When NASA’s Mars Perseverance touching the red planet later this month, it will arrive with very precious cargo. Among the brand new technologies is a drone that will fly on another planet for the first time ever: the Speed Helicopter.
Ingenuity is essentially a test flight – it is experimenting for the first time with flight on another planet and has limited capabilities. It weighs only 4 pounds, but its success will undoubtedly pave the way more ambitious exploration of the red planet.
“The Wright Brothers have shown that a powered flight in Earth’s atmosphere was possible by using an experimental aircraft,” Håvard Grip, chief pilot of Ingenuity, told NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in a statement. . “With ingenuity, we try to do the same for Mars.”
The Rover has no scientific tools to support Persistence, and is considered a completely separate mission from the rover. It currently sits in the belly of Perseverance, only to emerge after the duo touched Mars on February 18th.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Fly on Mars towards Earth
Mars’ thin atmosphere, which is 99% less dense than Earth’s, will make it difficult for Ingenuity to achieve enough lift to be able to fly properly. As a result, it is designed to be extremely lightweight. It stands only 19 centimeters long.
The helicopter has four large carbon fiber blades, formed in two rotors that extend about 4 feet and rotate at about 2400 rpm in opposite directions – significantly faster than typical helicopters on earth.
In addition, the Jezero crater, the landing site for Perseverance, is very cold – at night the temperature drops to minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Much of the ingenuity’s power goes directly to getting hot rather than flying on its own.
Flight controllers at JPL will not be able to control the skill while it is actually flying. Due to significant delays in communication, commands will be sent before flights, and the team will first know how the flight went. Ingenuity can make its own decisions about how to fly and keep itself warm.
“It’s a technology that’s really going to open up a new reconnaissance modality for us, much like the robbers did 20 years ago when our Sojourner flew to Mars on the first mission,” Matt Wallace, Mars 2020 Deputy Project Manager at JPL , said during a news conference last week.
Perseverance carries more than two dozen cameras and Ingenuity has two of its own. Here on earth we have a front view of Ingenuity’s test flights from the perspective of the rover, as well as aerial photos from the helicopter itself.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
What’s in a name?
The name Ingenuity was originally submitted by Alabama High School student Vaneeza Rupani for the Mars 2020 rover, which eventually got the name Persistence. But the NASA team thought it would be the perfect name for a helicopter that takes so much creative thinking to get off the ground.
“The ingenuity and brilliance of people working hard to overcome the challenges of interplanetary travel is what allows us all to experience the wonders of space exploration,” Rupani wrote. “Ingenuity is what enables people to do wonderful things.”
Twenty-eight thousand students in the US submitted essays and suggested names for NASA’s latest Mars Rover. Virginia Seventh Class Alexander Mather’s proposal, Perseverance, was finally chosen.
Ingenuity must pass tests before flight
The team at NASA has a list of milestones for the helicopter to survive before it ever takes off on Mars:
- Survive the launch from Cape Canaveral, which took place on 30 July; the journey to Mars; and landing on 18 February
- Safely deployed to the surface from within the abdomen of perseverance
- Keeps itself autonomously warm through the harsh Martian evenings with internal heaters
- Charge itself autonomously with a solar panel
After all this, Ingenuity will take off for the first time and hover off the ground for only 20 to 30 seconds before landing. If it makes a successful first flight, the team will try up to four other tests within a month, each gradually shifting the boundaries of distance and altitude, like a bird learning to fly.
“The Helicopter Ingenuity is a high risk, high reward,” Wallace said. “It’s something we’ve not tried yet and there will always be a likelihood of a problem. But that’s why we do it – we’ll learn from the problem if it occurs.”
United Launch Alliance
The addition of a component of aerial reconnaissance can be very important for future planetary exploration.
“The Ingenuity team has done everything to test the helicopter on Earth, and we look forward to flying our experiment in the right environment on Mars,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity’s project manager at JPL. “We will learn along the way, and it will be the best reward for our team to be able to add another dimension to the way we explore other worlds in the future.”
Helicopters on future Mars missions can act as robotic explorers, to view top-down areas to which robbers do not have access, or as spacecraft with scientific instruments. They could even help future astronauts one day explore the red planet.
But before any of this can happen, endurance must be the “seven minutes of fright“which involves its entry, descent and landing on Mars. NASA will see the historic event live on its website on February 18, starting at 14:15 ET.