Citation:
Youhanna V, Felicetti L, Ignatyev D. (2023) Parametric analysis of battery-electric rotorcraft configurations to fly on Mars. In: Aerospace Europe Conference Joint 10th EUCASS - 9th CEAS Conference 2023, 9-13 July 2023, Lausanne, Switzerland
Abstract:
The success of NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter promises that the future exploration of Mars will include aerobots in line with rovers and landers. However, Ingenuity lacks long-range endurance and scientific payload capacity because of its small and elementary design. In the series of optimised Martian drone concepts development, we introduced in this paper - an initial sizing of rotary eVTOL design configurations based on the performed parametric analysis for hover and vertical climb using simplified rotorcraft momentum theory, for a set of more challenging requirements for a Martian aerobot mission and sized to fit into the maximum spacecraft aeroshell limit. A tandem rotor configuration was found to be the most efficient configuration, whereas a conventional single main rotor configuration with small diameters manifested the poorest performance.