Interplanetary Surveillance Drone - Today’s controversial aerial robots could be tomorrow’s interplanetary explorers. At least if NASA’s next proposed robotic exploration mission to Jupiter’s moon Titan becomes a reality. It certainly would be more exciting to watch than the usual rover crawling along at sub-pedestrian speeds!
This mission (it’s just a proposal at this point) is called AVIATR, and it’s designed to be one of those (relatively) cheap New Frontiers missions that can be made to happen for under three-quarters of a billion dollars. AVIATR, thanks to NASA’s penchant for strained acronyms, stands for “Aerial Vehicle for In-situ and Airborne Titan Reconnaissance.” The overall idea is that instead of a lander or a rover, AVIATR would be a little 120-kilogram airplane driven by an electric propeller, with a big antenna for talking to Earth in its nose and a hefty science payload in its body. In flight, AVIATR would be able to cover much more ground with its instruments (including Titan’s equator and poles), sending back way more data about the moon as a whole. It wouldn’t be able to get as close as a lander or a rover, but it could survey literally the entire surface, with much more precision, detail, and versatility than an orbiter.
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