Spherical “Aerobots” may one day invade the caves of Titan, a moon of Saturn that NASA says is one of the most Earth-like moons in our solar system. Titan is covered in rivers, lakes and seas of hydrocarbons, such as methane and ethane, as well as strange “karst” terrain that includes sinkholes and underground caves. No rover could easily traverse this surface, but flying vehicles may be more successful. Therefore, a new grant, within the framework of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, in its initial stage, aims to create small flying vehicles that can explore these caves. It’s unclear whether the aerobots, called SPARK, or Solid State Propulsion for Autonomous Reconnaissance of Karst, would be ready in time for NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Titan, project leader Daniel Drew, an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, told Space.com. That’s because SPARK is starting a nine-month Phase 1 grant and would need to at least get through Phase 2 of up to two years before things look “more realistic” for takeoff, he said. Dragonfly, meanwhile, is scheduled for launch in 2028, but if the mission is delayed, that provides more scope for late mission additions. “Where does that line up with the current Titan mission schedule, assuming we’ve missed the window for Dragonfly? I don’t know,” Drew said of SPARK. But whenever the mission takes off, Drew said SPARK has a good chance of doing well on Titan with its novel ion (electric) thrusters. You might like Drew said his design could “provide persistence, maneuverability and robustness to the challenging near-cryogenic environment [icy] “He hopes that SPARK, he added, could be a precursor to cave exploration on Titan similar to the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars that made 72 flights, more than ten times what the Red Planet demonstration mission was supposed to do. Drew has been working on a particular type of ion thrusters, called electrohydrodynamic propulsion (EHD), since he did graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. Thanks in As part of a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Drew explored various designs for flying and became interested in creating robots that flap their wings in a manner similar to real-life creatures, while exploring, he stumbled upon the hobby “lifter” community “almost by chance,” he said. [prototypes] They are triangular prototypes made of balsa wood, magnetic wire and aluminum foil. You connect them to 40,000 volts from a flyback transformer that you pull from a microwave or CRT monitor or whatever, and they can float on the table. There are many examples of people doing this on YouTube,” he said. Further research in the archives revealed early experiments and studies at NASA and the Air Force similar to what hobbyists were using. And by coincidence, NIAC awarded funding to another research group, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that was interested in using EHD propulsion for ground-based aircraft. As such, Drew sensed a fruitful direction for the research. “In a nutshell, I followed that idea,” Drew said, “and wrote a bunch of articles where I created flying robots. “We recently published the design and liftoff of the first ion-powered microhovercraft,” he added, referring to a paper on arXiv preprint server. “It may seem like a pretty decent list of important milestones, but it’s not really a space full of people working on this topic. “Now, with NIAC support, Drew said he hopes to delve deeper into the benefits of EHD propulsion, such as its scalability, the fact that it is virtually silent and its simplicity (being solid state, there are fewer parts to worry about). A graphical representation of the SPARK concept being developed by Daniel Drew of the University of Hawaii. (Image credit: Daniel Drew/University of Hawaii) More applications could emerge outside of Titan, he noted: all-electric aircraft, “The big weakness is that it simply isn’t very efficient,” he said of EHD propulsion. “Unless a breakthrough occurs, it will be impossible to truly compete with more conventional propulsion techniques, such as rotors and jet engines, for the vast majority of terrestrial applications.” As Phase 1 only spans about nine months, Drew and his collaborators, including Ethan Schaler and Jacob Izraelevitz of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as well as Michael Malaska of the Blue Marble Space Science Institute, plan to quickly design experiments, conduct a “business study” on which subsystems are best to prioritize for things like power and modeling issues like thermal effects on the power system “I think the idea of ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ is very ingrained in the NIAC culture,” Drew said “Our main contribution at the end of this process is a comprehensive public vision. report. Leveraging previous related reports and other open research in the field is critical to doing a good job with this.”
