Tiny Nanocardboard Aircraft May Zoom Around Mars In The Future

Engineers with Penn State have introduced a new potential way for researchers to explore the atmosphere on other planets: nanocardboard. Specifically, the engineers envision something like nanocardboard 'flyers,' which would be able to levitate when exposed to bright enough flight. Fleets of these tiny aircraft could be deployed in the atmosphere on other planets, and they'd carry tiny payloads.

How do the 'flyers' levitate without any moving parts? Penn State explains that the nanocardboard aircraft can rise on the air generated when one side of the nanocardboard plates get warm, causing air to circulate through the material and shoot out its corrugated bits. That provides the thrust necessary to lift the cardboard aircraft.

Mars, in particular, would be a potential destination for these flyers, which would have an easier time operating in the thinner atmosphere. According to a study on the technology, each flyer would be able to carry payloads up to ten times as massive as the little 'ships' themselves for various missions.

There would be advantages to using a fleet of small aircraft rather than one single larger machine, such as the helicopter that NASA is shipping to Mars with its Perseverance rover. Study lead Igor Bargatin explained:

The Mars Helicopter is very exciting, but it's still a single, complicated machine. If anything goes wrong, your experiment is over, since there's no way of fixing it. We're proposing an entirely different approach that doesn't put all of your eggs in one basket.

Ultimately, it would take more than a million of these small nanocardboard aircraft to equal the mass of NASA's Mars Helicopter. Of course, there's one big downside: they'd be very limited in the payloads they could carry. Things like sensors could be placed on aircraft, for example, but they would have to weigh no more than a few milligrams at most.