The planet Mars is shown in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope view taken on May 12, 2016. NASA / Handout via Reuters
NASA hopes to record a Wright Brothers moment in the 21st century on Monday as it attempts to send a miniature helicopter over the surface of Mars in the first powered, controlled flight of an airplane on another planet.
Significant achievements in science and technology may seem humble through conventional measurements. The Wright Brothers’ first controlled flight in the world of a motor aircraft, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, traveled just 120 meters (12 meters) in 1903.
A modest debut is also in the offing for NASA’s twin-rotor solar-powered helicopter.
If all goes according to plan, the 1.8 kg will swirl slowly upwards to a height of 3 meters above the surface of Mars, move in place for 30 seconds and then turn until it lands on a soft descent on all four well.
Although the sheer dimensions may seem less than ambitious, the ‘airfield’ for the interplanetary test flight is 173 million miles from Earth, on the floor of an expansive Marsbassin called Jezero Crater. Success depends on Ingenuity executing the pre-programmed flight instructions using an autonomous pilot and navigation system.
“The moment our team has been waiting for is almost here,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity’s project manager, at a recent briefing in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at NASA near Los Angeles.
NASA itself compares the experiment to the performance of the Wright Brothers 117 years ago and pays homage to the modest but monumental first flight by placing a small amount of wing dust from the original Wright flyer under Ingenuity’s solar panel.
The robotic rotorcraft is tied to the red planet to the abdomen of NASA’s Mars Rover Perseverance, a mobile astrobiology laboratory that crashed into Jezero Crater on February 18 after a nearly seven-month journey through space.
Although Ingenuity’s flight test will start on Monday around 03:30 Eastern Time (07:30 GMT), the information confirming that this is the result of JPL is not expected to be reached until around 06:15 ET on Monday.
NASA also expects to receive images and videos of the flight that mission engineers hope to capture using helicopters mounted on the helicopter and the Perseverance Rover, which will be parked 250 meters (76 meters) from Ingenuity’s flight zone.
If the test passes, Ingenuity will undertake several additional, longer flights in the coming weeks, though it will have to rest between four and five days between each to recharge its batteries. Prospects for future flights for the first time are largely based on a safe four-point touch.
“It does not have a self-correcting system, so if we have a bad landing, it will be the end of the mission,” Aung said. An unexpectedly strong windstorm is a potential danger that could spoil the flight.
NASA hopes that Ingenuity – a technology demonstration separate from Perseverance’s primary mission to search for traces of ancient microorganisms – paves the way for aerial observations of Mars and other destinations in the solar system, such as Venus or Saturn’s moon Titan.
While Mars has much less gravity to overcome than Earth, its atmosphere is only 1% as dense, which presents a special challenge for aerodynamic elevators. To compensate, Ingenuity engineers equipped it with larger blades (4 feet long) and rotated it faster than would be needed on earth for an aircraft of its size.
The design has been successfully tested in vacuum chambers built at JPL to simulate Martian conditions, but it remains to be seen whether Ingenuity will fly on the red planet.
The small, lightweight aircraft has already passed an early important test by showing that it can withstand cold, while night temperatures can withstand as low as 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius), and use only solar power to charge and internal keep components properly heated. .
The planned flight was delayed for a week due to a technical fault during a test run of the aircraft’s rotors on 9 April. NASA said the problem has since been resolved.
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