Humans finally achieved controlled flight on another planet for the first time just a few years ago. Ingenuity, the helicopter NASA sent to Mars, performed that difficult task admirably. It is now taking a well-deserved rest until some intrepid human explorer someday comes by to pick it up and hopefully put it in a museum somewhere.
But what if, instead of a quadcopter, NASA used a series of flexible-wing robots akin to bees to explore the Martian terrain? That was the idea behind the Marsbee proposal by Chang-Kwon Kang and his colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. The project was supported by a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant back in 2018—let's see what they did with it.
The concept was initially inspired by work at the University of Tokyo on a dragonfly-like micro aerial vehicle (MAV). It is one of the few drones able to fly in Earth's gravity using flexible wings that flap. But would it be useful on Mars?
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