Concept Was Informed By AHS Student Design Competition

The Vertical Flight Society applauds the recent, announcement by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that it will develop a small unmanned helicopter to explore the surface of Mars: "The Mars Helicopter, a small, autonomous rotorcraft, will travel with the agency's Mars 2020 rover mission, currently scheduled to launch in July 2020, to demonstrate the viability and potential of heavier-than-air vehicles on the Red Planet." NASA announced its plans on May 11, 2018 to launch the Mars helicopter.

NASA describes the origins of the project: "Started in August 2013 as a technology development project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Mars Helicopter had to prove that big things could come in small packages. The result of the team’s four years of design, testing and redesign weighs in at little under four pounds (1.8 kilograms). Its fuselage is about the size of a softball, and its twin, counter-rotating blades will bite into the thin Martian atmosphere at almost 3,000 rpm – about 10 times the rate of a helicopter on Earth."

However, the Mars Helicopter conceptual design was actually first conceived in 1999 in response to the American Helicopter Society International's 17th Annual Student Design Competition. The winners of the graduate competition, announced in August 2000, were the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland. The UMD proposal, the Martian Autonomous Rotary-wing Vehicle (MARV), was designed by a team led by Anubhav Datta, now an associate professor at Maryland. The 1999-2000 AHS competition, sponsored by Sikorsky Aircraft and supported by NASA, was "to develop an autonomous rotorcraft for exploration of Mars. The mission was to be a proof-of-concept demonstration for rotary wing flight in the Martian atmosphere."

The similarities between the 2000 AHS-UMD MARV and the 2018 NASA Mars Helicopter, both with two-bladed coaxial rotors on a square fuselage, are quite noticeable. Prof. Datta today recalls that the AHS Student Design Competition "generated the first serious detailed designs" of an aircraft capable of vertical flight in the thin atmosphere of Mars. While working as a researcher at the Ames Research Center (2007-2015), Datta also worked on the NASA Mars Helicopter development (2015-2017). "I certainly credit my expertise on Mars and my involvement in this project to that design."

The 113-page University of Maryland proposal that won the 2000 AHS Student Design Competition is still available on the website.

(Source: Vertical Flight Society news release. Images from file)

FMI: www.vtol.org/education/student-design-competition/past-student-design-winners