Primary Authors: Mike Turner & Kelly Cole
Co-Authors: Varun Mittall, Kelly Cole, Sam Waldo, Wayne Neumaier & Greg Eakins
Special Acknwoledgements: Natasha Neogi - Mars Society of University of Illinois Faculty Advisor

Overview:

The idea of using aerial surveillance for scientific fields such as geology is one that has a great deal of potential scientific benefit. However to date, it is a non-standard practice & thus the field is not as developed as many other aerospace fields. To date, most unmanned aerial research has been for defense applications. Thus most of the available hardware consists of advanced, but largely expensive vehicles, that require a lot of skill & training to operate. To make these vehicles suitable for broader future use, more research needs to be performed in the field with the focus of making vehicles effective & fiscally practical to use.

With human mars missions projected is the next 10 - 50 years, a serious question arises. What hardware will bring to most benefit to this first wave of explorers? On Mars, aerial vehicles might offer a great deal of potential for assisting human exploration. In general aerial vehicles have the potential to collect a large amount of data on the environments they operate in. When humans arrive on Mars, there will be a great deal of unknowns, and such a vehicle could assist greatly in getting humans more familiar with how to operate & thrive in the martian environment. Potential applications include, pathfinding in unfamiliar terrain, searching for valuable resources (such as mineable minerals & water), and general scientific observation.

However, to make this a practical option, more needs to be understood about what makes an aerial vehicle a good scientific & operational tool, and how to construct these vehicles such that they are conducive to that. As it stands right now, the tools are not always a reliable option. Airplanes are complex systems & are susceptible to a great deal of problems that get in the way of the goals at hand. This in no way would be acceptable on Mars. The first explorers will only have a limited amount of resources with which to work with, and will not be able to spare any significant amount towards sustaining an aerial tool. Thus they need to be made reliable according to the needs of a Mars mission. Thus, analog field research should be performed to get experimental definitions of what "reliable" and "useful" in the context of a martian mission.

Goals:

The two main goals of the University of Illinois team are to:

1. Quantify how useful unmanned aerial vehicles are in scientific field work under Mars Analog conditions
2. Determine what factors are important in making unmanned aerial vehicles efficient, convenient, and cost effective tools for geological & general scientific field work.

To achieve the first goal, the team will consider the scientific conclusions that were drawn from the data obtained from aerial surveillance & earthbound fieldwork. Based on these considerations they will compare it to similar classes of strictly earthbound studies to quantify what more was learned from having aerial surveillance capabilities.

The fulfill the second objective, the crew will study the hardware's configuration ability to perform the analysis at hand. For a particular type of analysis, there is likely a set of optimal parameters that an aerial vehicle & its systems should conform to to gather the desired data. Examples of such parameters include, an optimal range of flight speeds, good camera clarity, and perhaps a specific set of instruments. These parameters should become obvious during the EVAs, and will be recorded in the post EVA reports.

The current vehicle may or may not be able to conform to these parameters. Thus, from this information, the benefits & flaws of the configuration can be inferred. In general a vehicle should be flexible enough to perform well a broad range of scientific tasks, and thus this analysis will help provide crucial lessons on how to design future vehicles for similar scientific purposes.

During the first EVA's the crew will try & qualitatively determine the parameters that matter in the vehicle's efficiency in completing desired objectives. Some of these parameters will be able to measured as data-points. Thus, once crucial parameters are realized, the crew will begin recording these. Coupling this hard data with suggestions & qualitative observations from the crew should allude to the set of optimal parameters discussed above.

In addition to scientific benefit, an aerial vehicle must be convenient. Using the vehicle must be a time & cost efficient and overall easy to use. The scientific benefit of such a vehicle may actually be degraded due to such problems. During the field work, the University of Illinois team will make note of problems of convenience so that solutions can be found in the post-mission analysis.

Based on this study, the University of Illinois team hopes to develop a several more generations of these vehicles which have incorporated the lessons learned from this first study and do several more to lay the foundations for broader future use of aerial vehicles for exploration on earth & mars.