Ingenuity took a trip to Mars under the belly of the Perseverance Rover, which landed on the Red Planet in February. The helicopter, which will operate for only 31 days and can fly for a maximum of 90 seconds, is intended to show that flight is possible on another planet, which could open the door for unmanned aircraft to see that parts of the planet do not have access to or act as scouts for astronauts on future missions.
Ingenuity will fly in an atmosphere that is only one percent as dense as the earth’s atmosphere. This means that although the helicopter is only 10 feet off the ground, it is as if it is flying 100,000 feet on the ground. By comparison, most commercial aircraft fly between 30,000 and 40,000 feet.
“If you take a small double-rotor helicopter that weighs about 4 kilograms and you make the carbon fiber blades fatter and rotate five times faster than an Earth helicopter, you can get enough lift” to fly further Mars, Hogg said.
Hogg, who has been working at NASA since 1997, talked about how his team was preparing for the historic flight and how the idea for a flying drone on another planet dates back to the 1990s.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
What is your role in the Perseverance Mission?
I have been working on the Mars 2020 project since 2012. Today I am the Deputy Manager of the Surface Mission for Mars 2020.
We plan what the rover will do with the next Mars sol [a day on Mars.] I’m the deputy who runs the team, so … we’re doing the mission. … It takes an army of people to pull it off in a way that is safe so that we do not lose our billion dollar asset, but also in a productive way to get all the science.
How does the team prepare for the first flight of Ingenuity?
On Saturday, we successfully completed a whole series of steps to deploy Ingenuity to the Martian surface. We spent ten days there on Mars, which may seem long, but very important things need to happen.
Once packaged and securely attached to the bottom of the rover, it’s 150 million miles away. It made it all the way to Mars, surviving the launch, entry, descent and landing. We do not want to stumble upon the 99-year-old line.
This past week or so … when we evaluated the flight area with the cameras’ cameras, we unloaded the debris shield outside the flight zone and then drove to one side of the flight zone to deploy Ingenuity to the surface. We went through several steps to do that. We lowered it onto an arm with a small motor, propelled it into a vertical position and finished the legs. … Then we spent an extra day or two making sure there was enough space for the car to drive away. … We had to take the rover away so that sunlight could hit Ingenuity’s solar cells within one day. It was critical to make this happen so that Ingenuity could charge its batteries and have enough energy to survive Mars Night.
Is there a camera on Ingenuity to take aerial photos of Mars?
Yes. There are two. One is a lower-resolution black-and-white navigation camera that captures photos quickly and uses computer vision to find out where the helicopter is. The second color camera is like what you would have on your phone to get color images too.
Where does this idea come from?
What kicked this whole thing off is the fact that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab landed the first rover on Mars in the 1990s. … We landed this microwave-sized rover and it was the first time we had ridden on another planet. … In different corners of JPL there was discussion about what about a flying machine? … In 2013, they had a research laboratory for flying machines. Our then director at JPL, Charles Elachi, went to a conference and came back to JPL and wondered if we could not do a flying machine. He toured the drone lab at JPL and said we were putting together a proposal for Mars 2020. The deadline was only 2 months away. Bob Balaram [the chief Ingenuity engineer] and his team burned the midnight oil and got a proposal.
What makes flying so difficult on Mars?
It flies in such a thin atmosphere. But even if you take a step back, we’re doing something on another planet with a one-way light-time of 15 minutes. This means that if I buy a remote control car and come alive healthy on the surface of Mars and hit the joystick, it will take 15 minutes before it starts moving and another 15 minutes before I know it is moving. … So you need an autonomous ability.
This is the next level of performance I describe, to be able to fly something in 1 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere on the surface of another planet that is 150 million kilometers away. These are astonishing engineering achievements that we are dealing with here. … It turns out that if you take a small double-rotor helicopter that weighs about 4 kilograms and you make the carbon fiber blades turn fatter and turn it five times faster than an earth helicopter, you can get enough lift to a very lightweight to lift. parcel.
So with the delay it will fly and land before you even know it?
The flights take an average of about 90 seconds. We send instructions for the day to the rover. The rover transmits instructions for the helicopter to a base station … via a radio link after Ingenuity woke up and came into communication with the rover. … So somewhere on Mars, … it will carry out the instructions for its first flight.
The results of the flight are sent to the base station during the flight, and then transmitted to the rover. Then the rover waits for a Mars orbit to go overhead and minutes or hours later, it’s all about what happened to the deep space network here on earth [which takes 15 minutes.] Then we get the story of what happened on Mars and unpack it all. Hopefully we celebrate.
All these steps happen to people who are just waiting on earth to see how it all plays out.
I can not imagine how stressful it is.
I remember Saturday afternoon. … We determined that the helicopter had sunk for the first time and that it had been switched on for the first time, and we knew it was alive. Then we let the robber drive away. We waited an hour and a half to see how the ride went and whether we would successfully discover helo to meet the 25 hour deadline. [after which Ingenuity would not have enough battery charge to survive a night on Mars.] … There are moments where it feels like a week of your life is passing by waiting to see if something happens that you have spent seven years in engineering. It’s exciting, thrilling and scary. This is why we do what we do.