China is forging ahead on many fronts, including a new space race. In addition to an orbital station and important Lunar missions, China has landed its first rover on Mars, and is now planning for future missions.
Like NASA, the NSSC is looking to add powered aircraft to future missions.* The leading candidate is a helicopter with two counter rotating blades. The 3 kg flyer would carry a tiny multispectral imager, and would have a range of maybe a kilometer per battery charge.
I gather that both NASA and NSSC determined that a helicopter is one of the best technologies for the low gravity and thin air on Mars. This early concept looks pretty conservative to me, NASA is looking at larger, multirotor systems. It’s early days yet, probably five years or more before a mission is dispatched. The pace of development has been breathless, though, so who knows what may be accomplished.
*I apologize for relying on secondary sources. I have never learned to read Chinese, so I am unable to follow the NSSC’s exciting work in the original.
- Andrew Jones, China’s Mars Helicopter to Support Future Rover Exploration, in IEEE Spectrum – Robotics, September 17, 2021. https://spectrum.ieee.org/china-mars-helicopter-rover-exploration
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