Mankind’s first helicopter on Mars has been cleared for a historic takeoff.
Ingenuity will take to the air above Jezero Crater on Sunday (April 11) Sunday (April 11) with a flight of 40 seconds – about four times longer than the Wright brothers’ first flight more than 117 years ago on earth. The first data, successful or not, should return to Earth around 03:30 EDT (0830 GMT) on Monday (April 12).
The flight plan allows the Martian bird to hover just 3 meters above the surface and collect black-and-white data of landmarks below it, as well as a high-definition horizon video and engineering data. The flight will also take place under the watch camera of the Perseverance Rover, parked about 60 meters from the launch site of Ingenuity.
Related: How to watch the first flight of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity online
‘Of course the team works very hard to be ready for that moment [of flight], so when we see the first data, that it works … it’s going to be an incredible moment, ‘said Tim Canham, head of Ingenuity Operations, during a live press conference at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA on Friday (April 9). said in California.
We’ve been imagining refugees on Mars since at least 1890 when Robert Cromie’s “A Plunge Into Space” depicts Mars airships penetrating the thin atmosphere. Although the drone-sized Ingenuity will be a simple up-and-down stay, the vision for its flight is no less ambitious.
The Martian atmosphere has a volume of only 1% of the Earth, so the helicopter must charge more than it would need to fly on Earth. The helicopter must also fly autonomously, as controllers on Earth are parked too far to move it around the crater. It must constantly recharge from the sun and survive the surface temperatures of minus 130 degrees Celsius per night. It took years of testing, flights of varying success in airspace and a long journey to Mars to get that far.
MiMi Aung, Ingenuity project manager at JPL, said she would be most excited about the black-and-white camera footage that will bring the helicopter back to Earth, showing its view from the air. “The images will be inspiring,” she said in the briefing, conceding that it would be hard to imagine how she would feel as the team did not try to achieve the success of the ambitious flight test.
If Ingenuity makes it and transmits data as planned, the black-and-white camera images will be taken downward at about 30 times per second and able to monitor the functions on the surface; In the long run, if all these images are on earth, the controllers will be able to estimate the velocity and direction of movement by looking at function drive.
There will also be a 13-megapixel camera on Ingenuity pointing to the horizon, which will take some photos during the flight. Extensive engineering data will also be collected with the photographs, such as the readings of the altimeter data that will be used to benefit future flying vehicles. NASA’s long-term vision is to employ drones that could one day climb to areas beyond the reach of current robbers, such as potential regions of habitability on the desert-like Red Planet. The drones can look ahead for robots and humans and help map routes even more efficiently than today.
The solar ingenuity will inform the design of these future robots. The helicopter team has 30 Marssole (about 31 days on Earth) to take the first preliminary flights. Assuming that ingenuity survives the first flight, it will rest and transmit data before attempting a second flight with sideways movement. Subsequent flights will take place every three or four Mars soles. The fifth flight – if Ingenuity gets that far – will be the chance to really rise. “The probability is that it is unlikely to land safely because we are going to unmarked areas,” Aung said.
Ingenuity is the product of about five years of flight tests in altitude chambers that simulate Mars conditions at JPL, including a test of the small helicopter itself in 2019 that went exactly according to plan. The engineers therefore know that it is theoretically possible to fly on Mars, and that there is a weather station available for endurance to approve or wave the flight given the current conditions, but there is still the element of uncertainty.
Additional challenges are to return everything from Ingenuity and Perseverance. The planned five-minute flight video of the Rover, in 4K definition, for example, will take months to send back to Earth, given the availability of bandwidth from Mars’ surface through the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to NASA’s Deep Space Network of dishes which picks up information from spatial spaces.
JPL therefore plans to rather select some key frames from the video and send them back in the hope that at least one of the frames depicts how the ingenuity takes to the air. The Mastcam-Z panoramic camera team also simulates taking footage from afar, aiming to get ingenuity at a distance exactly within frame, as it aims to capture the zoomed-in and out-zoomed footage at the same time.
The best video resolution is seven frames per second, but only a portion of the frame is captured and then compressed to send back to earth. There is already practice; Mastcam-Z returned a short video of the helicopter turning its blade upwards to 50 revolutions per second, but it was on the ground.
Getting the angle right to capture ingenuity in the air will be ‘really’ difficult, ‘said Elsa Jensen, general manager of Mastcam-Z at Malin Space Science Systems, at the same briefing. Mastcam-Z is designed for large parts of the terrain, while Ingenuity’s flight will only take place in a small portion of the total camera framework. “We hope everything will go well on Sunday, but we know there will be surprises. That’s what we’ve been training for,” she said.
The rover team may also try to capture the sound of Ingenuity’s future flights with Perseverance’s SuperCam microphone, but there is no plan to do so for the first outing. “It’s very touching when we can hear something from that distance,” Canham said. There have been further discussions about when to record. “The worst gets worse, maybe we get very little,” he jokes the audio material.
The last time NASA took such an ambitious step on the Red Planet was with the Sojourner rover, a bread-sized vehicle that rolled on the surface for a few short months in 1997 and like a puppy the rocks sat.
This first mobile Mars vehicle was also a test to see if robbers could take over the rough terrain on Mars, far from immediate help from Earth. It worked beyond expectation and was a pioneer in a generation of NASA explorers (Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and now Perseverance) who sought water and signs of ancient habitability; Perseverance, if all goes according to plan, will participate in a larger sample mission that will bring rocks that bring it back to Earth for detailed analysis.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA collaborator for science, said at the press conference that Ingenuity will play a similar role in NASA history as Sojourner. “We are ready for another historic moment,” he said.
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