Dropship offers safe landings for Mars rovers

The dramatic conclusion to ESA s latest StarTiger project: a dropship quadcopter steers itself to lower a rover gently onto a safe patch of the rocky martian surface. StarTiger s Dropter project was tasked with developing and demonstrating a European precisionlanding capability for Mars and other targets. Starting from scratch for the eightmonth project, the Dropter team was challenged to produce visionbased navigation and hazard detection and avoidance for the dropship. It has to identify a saf