NASA wants to send a quadcopter drone to Titan


Larry Matthies—a Senior Research Scientist and the supervisor of the Computer Vision Group, in the Mobility and Robotic Systems Section of the JPL in Pasadena, California—thinks that this may be the only solution that can achieve mission objectives—the search for life or prebiotic chemistry in one of the places in the solar system more likely to have it—safely and at low cost and low risk.

A lander will not cut it because it can't move. They need to explore this world. A balloon or an airplane can easily move, but they can't be the solution because they can't access the surface. And a large, long-range helicopter can work, but it is way too expensive and risky. So he combined all of these ideas and came up with something relatively low cost, low risk, and absolutely logical:



Boom. He argues that this is only possible now because of the recent development in robotics and drones here on Earth:





And the cool thing is that these drones will be able to fly back to base, return the samples or data, recharge their battery thanks to the nuclear power generator in the mothership, and take off for another flight.

The idea is pretty revolutionary in practice, but not something that we haven't seen in science fiction movies: Little drones quickly exploring large areas and returning with information to the mothership or base spaceship.

Matthies says that these low cost drones can change not only the exploration of Titan, but any other world. Imagine that Curiosity had a couple of these low cost drones on its back right now. Scientists could quickly fly them to recognize terrain ahead and even retrieve samples to bring back to Curiosity. Then researchers would be able to set new mission objectives according to this information.

And that, my friends, sounds like the future of autonomous planetary exploration to me.
