Planning for the NASA-European Space Agency Mars Sample Return campaign includes an option for Sample Recovery Helicopters (SRH), which would collect sample tubes and bring them to the Sample Retrieval Lander if NASA’s Perseverance rover would be unable to do so. As a member of the helicopter team, I was responsible for developing the Gravity Offload System (GOS), which would be used to simulate Martian gravity while testing the helicopter’s flight in a vacuum chamber.
I resurrected the GOS hardware developed for the Ingenuity helicopter, which had been in storage for five years, was missing components, and had no documentation. I then developed hardware and software for a system performance characterization testbed, which I used to evaluate the GOS developed for the Ingenuity helicopter. With the data I collected, I diagnosed performance anomalies in the inherited hardware and identified architectural changes to improve performance.
Catherine Pavlov 