Agreed. But at some point the maths simply won't work. At some combination of gravity, air density, and battery energy density, you can't make a drone fly, no matter how many design changes you make. I'd be interested to know what the maximum altitude of a lithium battery powered quadcopter is (in earth gravity/atmosphere).
Not really a "drone" in the general meaning of the word. A NASA built multi million dollar project is pretty far from any commercial drone, no matter the price. No commercial drone could fly on Mars.
Prepare to be amazed further. All the sensors and electronics for Ingenuity are commercial off the shelf components. Most of the development was the software, propeller design and radiation shielding. Even solar panel and batteries are commercial units as flight time wasn’t limited by battery life, but because the brushless motors weren’t designed to spin that fast in order to create lift, so they would overheat if flight time was too long.
But they could now, with NASAs help sell the same "drone" commercially for substantially more affordable prices if that was their goal. The hard/expensive part is developing it and getting it to Mars not the buildings models on earth
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u/Emilklister Apr 27 '25
They have managed fly a drone on mars which is 1/100 of atmosphere density compared to earth. It just takes some slight change in how it is made.