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For the first time in more than 30 years, NASA has no firm plans to send any new landers or rovers to Mars. Instead, the agency's near-term focus at the red planet is on aerial drones, a pioneering mode of exploration that didn't seem realistic until a few years ago.
The first real use of drones for science at Mars will come with the SkyFall mission, a fleet of three helicopters set for launch as soon as late 2028. SkyFall's helicopters will ride to the red planet with NASA's Space Reactor-1 "Freedom" mission, which has the primary objective of demonstrating nuclear electric propulsion in deep space.
The launch schedule is aggressive for SR-1 Freedom and SkyFall, projects that didn't even exist in NASA's portfolio six months ago. NASA's plan for the SR-1 Freedom mission, estimated to cost $2.1 billion, calls for repurposing the core module of the canceled Gateway lunar space station into a testbed for nuclear electric propulsion. SkyFall will build on NASA's success with the Ingenuity helicopter, an experimental vehicle that became the first rotorcraft to fly on another world in 2021.
Ukrainian drone operators have destroyed many Russian armored vehicles on the ground and even military helicopters in midair using $400 Shrike drones with explosive payloads. Now thousands of such drones are getting upgraded with an AI system capable of autonomously tracking and homing in on moving targets.
In mid-July, the Ukrainian military began receiving Shrike drones made by the Ukrainian company SkyFall equipped with AI-powered autonomy hardware and software developed by the US company Auterion. The companies plan to deliver 50,000 drones equipped with Auterion’s Skynode S strike kits in the coming months.
That allows human operators to manually fly the Shrike first-person view (FPV) drones into a battlefield area, designate a target up to half a mile away, and then “flip the switch to turn it into fire-and-forget terminal guidance mode,” Lorenz Meier, co-founder and CEO of Auterion, told Ars.
A little more than three years since NASA's Ingenuity helicopter ended its pioneering mission at Mars, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are designing next-generation Martian rotorcraft to carry heavier payloads longer distances through the planet's low-density atmosphere.
Ingenuity was a resounding success, becoming the first airborne platform to explore another world. The dual-bladed helicopter made 72 flights, overachieving NASA's original goal of five flights over 30 days, after delivery to Mars by the Perseverance rover. By the time the mission ended with a crash-landing in January 2024, Ingenuity had shown scientists a new way to explore other worlds, using air to travel longer distances and reach locations inaccessible to ground vehicles.
NASA plans to send three more helicopters to Mars on the SkyFall mission, which could launch as soon as late 2028. SkyFall is set to ride to the red planet aboard a nuclear-powered spacecraft named Space Reactor-1, or SR-1, one of the tech demo initiatives announced earlier this year by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.
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