After Ingenuity, what next for flying drones on an alien world?

Nasa’s Ingenuity mission to fly in the Martian atmosphere was stunning but what comes next could be sensational, says Steven Cutts. Flying drones on other planets has only just begun

The Ingenuity drone is the first powered aircraft to fly in the atmosphere of another planet (AP)

Nasa’s drone Ingenuity has just become the first powered aircraft to get airborne on another planet. It’s a fantastic achievement and the kudos with being the first has always been massive, but in many ways, Ingenuity is merely the latest in a long stream of imaginative designs. Space scientists have long dreamt of flight on an alien world. Even the best of robotic rovers have only covered a few miles of territory. But a flying robot is a different matter. It can traverse very large distances at low altitude and has the option of landing intermittently to analyse the actual surface of the planet and recharge its batteries. Now after several decades of daring prototypes and outlandish concepts a small, two-kilogram helicopter has finally flown in the tenuous atmosphere of Mars.

In 1985, two balloons were deployed by a Soviet lander on Venus. The main landing spacecraft released the balloons at high altitude and they were designed to ascend to about 54km. At this height, the atmospheric density on Venus is similar to that found on Earth. They sent back data for a day or two but didn’t carry cameras. A gondola weighing about seven kilograms was provided by the French Space Agency, who were working alongside the Soviets. In some respects, it was quite obviously simple kit. As with Ingenuity, it was only an add-on to the main mission but it demonstrated the ability of a balloon-like scientific probe to collect and return data from another planet.

In more recent years, America’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has looked at the possibility of sending an updated device to Venus. Google has done extensive work on balloons that are designed to function in the Earth’s atmosphere. Their job was to provide internet access to remote parts of the world. This project has done a lot of the groundwork for a potential probe to Venus.