Dropter - delivery and landing of rovers

Dropter is a European Space Agency (ESA) project under the StarTiger program. Its goal is to smoothly descend mobile moving vehicles to safe areas of the rocky surface of Mars.

StarTiger is an ESA program when a highly qualified team of experts from various fields gathers at one well-equipped research center, they are faced with a complex technical task and a time limit is given to solve it. The latest StarTiger team was housed at the Airbus Defense & Space research center in Bremen (Germany), which included engineers from the German Artificial Intelligence Research Center, the Portuguese aviation company Spin.Works and the Poznań Polytechnic Institute. After allocating a period of 8 months to the project, the scientists were given the task of creating a visual navigation for the dropping drone, the ability to detect and avoid interference. The drone should find the place most suitable for landing, determine the height and lower the rover on the cables.

At the moment, the maximum height of the Dropter’s flight is 17 meters, approaching the surface by 10 meters, the drone begins to release the rover on a 5-meter cable, continuing to decline until the landing vehicle lands. Flight tests took place at the Airbus site in northern Germany, which, as far back as the 1940s, was the scene of rocket experiments by Eugen Zenger, head of the Zilberfogel project . A pad 40 by 40 meters was created, resembling the rocky surface of Mars, where the rover was to be lowered into the safe zone. For preliminary tests, the device was assembled from components of a commercial drone. Using GPS and inertial systems, the drone gets to the intended point, then goes into a visual navigation mode based on a laser rangefinder and barometer, and makes a landing of the rover.


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The history of landings and crashes on Mars: