The exploration of Mars is the next stage of human travel in the solar system. Numerous missions have already been conducted that have landed autonomous rovers over the surface of Mars. The next step in this scouting activities is to boost the exploration of the red planet by allowing autonomous drones to fly in the Martian atmosphere such that a larger portion of the surface can be explored at a faster pace. This project aims at performing some preliminary numerical study on the aerodynamic performance of martian UAVs. This will allow understanding typical values of Lift/Drag ratios and aerodynamic loads to which such UAVs will be subject while flying in the martian atmosphere. Key objectives:

Identify a suitable UAV configuration, generate its geometrical representation and computational mesh (https://gmsh.info); Identify a series of operating conditions for which testing the aerodynamic performance of the UAV; Performing the CFD simulations (https://su2code.github.io) and draw a preliminary map of the performance of the vehicle including estimations of the power consumption based on the analogous of the Breguet formula.