Valles Marineris on Mars is a unique geologic phenomenon, but its size makes exploration with traditional bicycles nearly impossible. Therefore, scientists propose to use helicopters like Ingenuity for this purpose.
Exploring Valles Marineris
At the recently concluded 56th International Conference on Planetary and Monthly Sciences, one of the presentations focused on an interesting aspect of the study of Mars. Its authors are a team of scientists and engineers who have recently been testing drones in the Alvord Desert, Oregon.
More specifically, it is about exploring Valles Marineris. It is the largest canyon in the solar system. It is 4,000 kilometers long, meaning that if it were located on Earth, it would stretch across the entire United States, from ocean to ocean. At the same time, its width in some places reaches 200 kilometers, and its depth is seven.
All of this makes Valles Marineris a unique place to explore the planet’s geologic past. After all, the slopes of the giant canyon contain the exposure of many layers of geologic sediments. However, it is not so easy to reach them, because they are cliffs hundreds of meters high. So it will not be possible to use rovers for this purpose, as it has been done so far.
Helicopters
That’s why the research team offers another solution: helicopters. They will be able to fly close enough to the slopes of the Valles Marineris and examine their constituents visually, or else take samples for further study on site or in a lab on Earth.
This concept has already been shown to be effective right on Mars. We’re talking about the unmanned Ingenuity helicopter that once traveled to Mars with the Perseverance rover. During its work on the Red Planet, it made 72 flights totaling 128 minutes and traveled 17 kilometers in the process.
The new tests on Earth took samples of the next generation of technology. Under complex geologic conditions, they collected spectral and microwave radiometry data regarding changes in soil moisture throughout the day, determined the chemical composition of rock outcrops that identified plagioclase phenocrysts (crystals formed due to volcanism), and created digital elevation models of Mickey Buttes, which is 600 meters high.
According to phys.org
