“Can we fly this on Mars?” Mars helicopter joins Mars Mission

When JPL-NASA staff member Stephan Weiss demonstrated his drone navigation technology during a flight demonstration in 2013, Charles Elachi, head of JPL at the time, asked him: “Can we fly this on Mars?” This marked the beginning of a successful development story, which will shortly culminate in the Mars Mission 2020 deployment of an adapted version of the drone flight technology developed by Weiss, who is now a professor at the Alpen-Adria-Universität. 

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One time for all: Synchronising time in drone swarms

Wherever several clocks tick simultaneously, it is tricky to get them all to display precisely the same time. This can be a challenge for drone swarms that are airborne together. To tackle this problem, young scientist Agata Gniewek is developing new technologies.

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Researchers from Klagenfurt participate in an Analog Mars Mission in Oman

The deserts of Dhofar, the largest governorate in the Sultanate of Oman, bear a remarkable similarity to the surface of Mars in terms of structural composition. The Austrian Space Forum (ÖWF) has therefore chosen Oman as the location of a large-scale Analog Mars Mission  scheduled for February 2018 in order to conduct field studies. 16 experiment teams will participate in this event, including the research group for autonomous drone navigation led by Stephan Weiss.

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Smaller & lighter: Printed sensors for spectrometers

Imagine that a pipeline that stretches for miles and miles springs a leak. Traditionally, this would mean many miles of walking for someone tasked with finding the hole. In an ideal world, this search for the precise point of methanol leakage could also be performed by a drone, onto which a spectrometer has been mounted that specializes in analysing chemical samples. Existing devices are currently far too heavy; the drone would soon have to give up. Lisa-Marie Faller is working on a technology, with which the fitted spectrometers can be made much smaller and would therefore be suitable for this type of deployment, amongst others. In recognition of her work, the doctoral student received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Conference EuroSimE in Dresden in April.

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