By Laurence Togetti, MSC
April 30, 2025
What are the best methods to explore Valles Marineris on Mars. This is the largest canyon in the solar system? This is what a study recently launched on the 56th Lunar and Planetary Conference hopes to examine as a research team how helicopters could be used to examine Valles Marineris, which could offer insights into the chaotic past of Mars. This study has the potential to help scientists and engineers to develop new methods to investigate the history of Mars and whether the red planet once had a life as we know it.
For the study, the researchers carried out a field examination with unmanned aircraft in the Alvord Hot Spring in the Alvord desert in Oregon from July 27 to August 3, 2024. In the end, the researchers successfully collected spectrald data and microwave radiometric data for changes in the soil moisture during the day, spectrald data for information, the plagioclas pheno doors (crystals from volcanism) and the production of digital height models from Mickey -Buttes identified, which are approximately 600 meters (2,000 feet).
The study comes to the conclusion: “Two other field advisors are planned for the summer of 2025 and 2026.
As already mentioned, Valles Marineris is the largest canyon in the solar system and measures more than 4,000 kilometers long, 200 kilometers wide and 7 kilometers deep. For the context, its length corresponds to the United States from coast to coast, and its depth is more than half of the distance of the deepest oceans on earth. In view of the size of Mars, Valles Marineris extends about a quarter of the scope of the planet.
The exact processes that are responsible for the formation and development of Valles Marineris have been discussed for decades and are still ongoing. While early hypotheses suggested to carve liquid water from the solid canyon, newer hypotheses suggest a crust distribution, with the East African crack being used as an earth analogy. Hundreds of millions of – potentially billions – years ago, intensive volcanism formed the Tharsis outlet, which consists of the largest volcanoes of the red planet, some of which are the largest volcanoes in the solar system (Olympus Mon). The total weight of Tharsis supposedly caused a massive crack in the crust, which led to the formation of Valles Marineris.
Due to the exposed geological and volcanic layers that extend in several directions in Valles Marineris, this offers a unique opportunity for the scientific collection that could help scientists gain enormous insights into the geological and volcanic history that contributed to the formation of Valles Marineris. This recently carried out study shows that helicopters or UAVs, given the extreme difficulty of using traditional rovers, could carry out this scientific analysis that the study accepts as “impossible”.
This study takes place after the NASA has successfully landed and tested and tested its imagination helicopter, which was the first spaceship to carry out a driven flight in another world. After the ingenuity in the understair of endurance Rover exceeded the expectations regarding the flight duration and the distance both in height and the rover. This includes 72 flights, about 129 minutes flight time, approximately 17 kilometers (11 miles), the maximum height and a maximum basic speed of 10 meters per second (22.4 miles per hour) (22.4 miles per hour).
How can helicopters help to explore Valles Marineris in the coming years and decades? Only time will say it, and that's why we know!
As always, they continue and continue looking!
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