Early Monday, a robotic helicopter sent by NASA to Mars will try to take off a few meters into the air, soar and land again. With the simple performance, it would become the first machine to fly through the airy sky of the red planet. NASA officials compared it to the 1903 Wright Brothers flight in Kitty Hawk, NC. Never before has anything like an airplane or a helicopter taken off into another world.
The Mars helicopter, named Ingenuity, hid from Earth under NASA’s Perseverance Rover, which landed in February on a mission to search for signs of ancient life near a dried-up river delta. A few weeks ago, Perseverance Ingenuity dropped on a flat Mars Plain before the flight tests.
Ingenuity is small. The main body is about the size of a softball with four protruding legs. At the top are two sets of blades, each about four feet from point to point. They rotate in opposite directions at about 2,500 rotations per minute, which requires the fast speed to generate enough lift for Ingenuity to get off the ground.
When will Ingenuity fly and how can I watch it?
At the Ingenuity site on Mars, which is inside an old crater called Jezero, it will be the middle of the day, around 12:30 local Mars solar time. (The time zones on the red planet do not yet have names.)
For people on earth, it means Monday around 3:30 Eastern time. But no one on earth will know for hours whether the flight passed or failed, and whether anything happened. No ingenuity or perseverance will be in contact with NASA at that time.
Instead, the two spacecraft will perform the flight autonomously and carry out instructions sent to them. on sunday. Later, Perseverance will send data back to Earth via a spacecraft orbiting Mars.
NASA TV will begin broadcasting from the control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at 6:15 a.m. Eastern time as the data begins to arrive on Earth. You can check it out on NASA’s website.
Additional information will be provided during a news conference Monday at 2 p.m.
What will happen during the test flight?
The first flight is a modest up-and-down journey, which will rise to an altitude of only 10 feet. There it will soar for up to 30 seconds and then descend to a landing. The camera on board will record images that help the navigation system maintain the helicopter’s level. On the ground more than 200 feet further, the Perseverance cameras will also record the flight.
If the test flight passes, up to four more can be attempted. The first three are designed to test the basic capabilities of the helicopter. The third flight can fly a distance of 160 feet and then return.
The last two flights could travel further, but NASA officials did not want to speculate how many.
NASA wants to close the tests within 30 days of the date Ingenuity was downloaded, so that perseverance can begin with the bulk of its $ 2.7 billion mission. It will leave the helicopter behind and depart in the direction of a river delta along the edge of the Jezero crater, where sediments and perhaps chemical hints of ancient life are preserved.
Ingenuity was a pleasing $ 85 million add-on project, but not a core requirement for the success of perseverance.
Why is it so difficult to fly a helicopter on Mars?
There is not much air to press against to generate elevator.
On the surface of Mars, the atmosphere is only 1/100 as dense as Earth. The less gravity – one third of what you feel here – helps to get in the air. But rising from the surface of Mars is comparable to flying at an altitude of 100,000 feet on Earth. No helicopter on our planet has flown so high, and that is more than twice the typical flight altitude of aircraft.
Why is NASA flying a helicopter on Mars?
Until 1997, all the spacecraft sent to the surface of Mars were stationary landers. But that year, the Pathfinder mission included something revolutionary for NASA: a wheeled robot. That rover, Sojourner, was about the size of a short archive box, and planetary scientists quickly realized the benefits of being able to move in the Martian landscape. Four more NASA robbers, including perseverance, have since followed to the red planet.
Ingenuity is essentially the counterpart from Sojourner’s air, a demonstration of a new technology that can be extended to later missions. And demonstrating that the helicopter can fly on Mars can help inform flight attempts on other worlds in our solar system, such as Titan, the moon of Saturn to which NASA plans to send a nuclear-powered car.