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Where do you get 50% from? It's got landing legs, and will be placed right-side-up to start with by the Mars 2020 rover.


All it takes is to land on the side on one rock and it's over. I would say the chance is more like 98% over the span of a few years.


Vision navigation systems are pretty effective these days - 'avoid big rocks' seems like a straightforward use case for that. And clearly the landing systems would need to account for some degree of rough terrain. The wheeled drones go through a tremendous amount of testing of the various conditions they would encounter - a flying drone would go through the same engineering rigour before it was approved for the mission.

Also, I believe most of the activity of these devices is planned out well in advance, so you could even add human review to some of that process. It could take a short flight for a few high-rez pictures, land right near (or exactly) where it took off from, send the pics back to earth for review to pick it's next landing spot.




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