So far, the exploration of humans on Mars has been measured by the circular motion of orbits above the planet and the winding routes on the ground below. Early next month, NASA will enter the elusive space between the two kingdoms with the launch of the box-shaped helicopter Ingenuity.
Equipped with two 2400 rpm rotors (one on top of the other), lithium batteries placed on solar power and four carbon composite legs, Ingenuity plans to run humanity’s first powered and controlled test flight on another planet. The NASA team that operates Ingenuity has now discovered the area in which the $ 80 million helicopter will travel to the skies of Mars: an elongated zone of 300 feet in the immediate vicinity of the Perseverance Rover, which landed on Mars last month landed.
“The Perseverance Rover has the most advanced range of science instruments we have ever sent to Mars,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science division, told a news conference today. In addition to the Rover’s research equipment, it has brought a special side project: the Mars helicopter.
Like a baby bat clinging to its parent in the air, Ingenuity arrived at Jezero Crater, strapped to the belly of Perseverance. The helicopter has yet to be deployed, still located in the safety of the Rover’s power supply. But once that’s done, the craft’s plan is short and sweet: take off and soar, and, if the team is happy, do it a few more times. Each glide is planned to last 20 to 30 seconds.
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Although much of Mars is blissfully flat, including the ancient antique lake bed where perseverance landed, it would have great benefits to traverse the planet through the air. NASA scientists hope that in the future the helicopter will map a way forward for more advanced Mars spacecraft and that it can inform flight missions elsewhere, such as the planned voyage of Dragonfly on the moon Titan.
Once Ingenuity has separated from Perseverance, the Rover will expel the area to ensure that the experimental helicopter does not fall into the shadows before Mars’ sunrise. (It will only have enough power left over from his umbilical cord connection with the rover to keep one Mars night without solar power, so it’s important that he has free access to sunlight the next day.) Perseverance goes to look at the newly named Van Zyl about 200 meters from the helicopter’s unloading point to observe the performance of the smaller craft. The view is not monumental; about 3 feet higher than the flight zone, but high enough for a good view.
After being tested in a simulated Mars atmosphere on Earth (think a vacuum-sealed grain silo), the helicopter is currently scheduled not to try the right thing sooner. according to April 8 according to Bob Balaram, the chief engineer for Ingenuity. Because it uses off-the-shelf components that help the helicopter navigate in the thin Marslug and transmit information to perseverance, Speed is truly a computer genius compared to its predecessors.
“The specific computer we use here at Ingenuity is about 150 times faster than that of Perseverance,” Balaram told a NASA press conference today. “If you add up all the computers that flew in the solar system and you sum it all up, we dwarf it by two orders.”
Despite the fact, Ingenuity is still an interplanetary demo, meaning the mini-helicopter only has a short period of time. It has an Earth month to test its wings – arm, rotors – and can fly up to five times. The NASA team declined to comment on whether the later flights would be more ambitious than the first, short test.
Not a group to escape before an event symbolism, NASA has attached a piece of material about the size of a postage stamp under the helicopter’s solar panel. It was ragged from one of the Wright brothers’ first powered flight-operated aircraft, which was flown at Kitty Hawk nearly 120 years ago. The brothers auctioned sheaths of the fabric to raise funds for future flight efforts, and buyers of one of the fragments provided it to the Mars 2020 team. It’s an extremely appropriate story arc that the cloth now has to fly again, a literal world away.