Preliminary Investigation into Future Martian Multicopter Configurations

The success of NASA's Ingenuity Helicopter underscores the importance of aerobots in Mars exploration, however, its limitations in endurance and payload capacity necessitate optimization of the next-generation rotorcrafts. This paper proposes an approach to enhance Martian rotorcraft within specified parameters, aiming to improve performance and meet evolving mission demands. For rotorcrafts with both overlapping and non-overlapping rotors, such as coaxial, tandem, and multirotor configurations, the equations are derived and generalized based on the momentum theory for the conventional helicopter. These equations estimate the required power for flight segments such as hover, vertical climb, and forward flight, considering constraints such as spacecraft aeroshell size. The resulting performance informs initial rotor and battery sizing for aerobot design. Among the configurations created and investigated, the quadcopter emerges as the most efficient choice, offering a balance of performance and mechanical simplicity, while a conventional single main rotor configuration appeared to be the least efficient within the specified constraints.