NASA unveils flight zone for historic helicopter flight on Mars

NASA announced on Tuesday that NASA has locked up a place on Mars for the first demo flight of its mini-helicopter called Ingenuity. The four-pound rotorcraft is ready to embark on the first powered flight on another planet, demonstrating a new capability that could unlock access to hard-to-reach areas of other celestial bodies in the future.

Ingenuity arrived on Mars in February, clinging to the belly of the Perseverance Rover, and surviving a seven-month journey through deep space and an intense seven-minute landing series through Mars’ atmosphere. Engineers began analyzing the footage within hours of landing Perseverance to find a primary flight area to unload Ingenuity for its first flight – an area where the helicopter could take off safely, and also safe for the helicopter to take off. country. again after the flight, ”said the craft’s chief pilot, Håvard Grip.

According to him, the landing site must be flat and free of any large rocks that could threaten Ingenuity’s flight moss. But it also had to have ‘texture’ – different features on the ground that the helicopter’s AI-powered navigation camera could detect to determine where it was during the flight. Shortly after landing, “we began to realize that we might just have an amazing airport in front of our noses,” Grip told reporters at a news conference Tuesday.

Perseverance is in the middle of a day-long drive to the airfield, just 196 yards from the landing site. When it arrives, the rig will be lowered to the ground. Then Perseverance will spend about 25 hours driving about 330 feet away to a NASA name, the Van Zyl Overlook, as a tribute to Jakob Van Zyl, a senior scientist from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who passed away last year.

Unloading ingenuity in its flight zone is a very prescribed and careful process, ‘said Farah Alibay, who is leading the integration of Ingenuity with Perseverance. Ingenuity must be flipped from its current horizontal position on the rover to a vertical position before touching the ground, which will ‘take several days’, she said. “The most stressful day, at least for me, will be that last day as we finally separate the helicopter and drop ingenuity to the ground.”

Image: NASA / JPL

Lockheed Martin designed the Mars Helicopter Delivery System that will help put Ingenuity’s small landing feet on the ground. Keeping the delivery system lightweight and secure was even a major challenge for Lockheed, who has decades of experience designing space systems. “We had to put all the heritage and knowledge aside and literally start all over again with a new design for electrical connections,” said Jeremy Morrey, Lockheed’s lead engineer for the implementation system. The edge in an interview.

Once on the ground, NASA engineers expect Ingenuity to do its first flight test no earlier than April 8, depending on the weather of Mars, or it will take a few days. The helicopter’s flight zone is shaped like a mini-runway, with a box-shaped take-off and return area on one side of the zone. “The first flight is special – it’s by far the most important flight we plan to do,” Grip said, adding that a successful first flight would mean ‘complete mission success’.

For that debut flight, Ingenuity will climb almost 3 meters, soar in its place for about 30 seconds, turn in the air and then descend for a landing. It will be fully autonomous and work according to instructions sent by engineers on earth the previous day. A 0.5 megapixel navigation camera at the bottom of Ingenuity will take 30 photos per second of the ground to notify its movement.

Ingenuity has another, more powerful 13-megapixel camera looking at the horizon. It will take photos in the air while cameras on board Perseverance want to fly the helicopter. All these photos will eventually be sent back to earth.

Image: NASA / JPL

Another four flight tests are planned in a month-long window after Ingenuity’s first ten-foot takeoff. What the helicopter does during those flight tests depends largely on the results of the first one. “It can in principle currently go higher as it was designed,” Grip said. “There may be cases where, if things go well during our nominal flights, we can pull things a little further than the nominal flight.”

After that, Ingenuity’s test campaign is likely to come to an end. This is a demo mission, and perseverance has other goals to focus on, such as collecting Mars ground samples for a future Mars mission to bring back to Earth.

If successful, Ingenuity will mark the first car flight into another world. A mission to Venus by the Soviet Union in the 1980s under its Vega program claimed the title for the first foreign flight, with two balloon planes (not propelled) flying in the clouds of Venus. Off-road helicopters such as Ingenuity, if it proves to be viable, could be used in future missions to pull places where robbers could not reach, such as caves, tunnels or mountain peaks.

Even before Ingenuity’s first flight, engineers have been celebrating it so far. Morrey, the Lockheed engineer, said a small four-pound helicopter survived a journey from Earth to Mars. ‘You have to survive the launch on a rocket while you have a carbon fiber spring. It has never been done before, ”he said of a mission like this.