Have you ever dared to dream of the day you would see a helicopter in space? Well, rest assured, your watch has come to an end – NASA’s Ingenuity, the ‘Mars Helicopter’, is one month away from the red planet.
Ingenuity is currently aboard NASA’s Perseverance Rover, the latest Mars-bound Rover from the US. It is the first U.S. mission to Mars since InSight in 2018, but it was just one of three missions sent to Mars in 2020, along with the UAE’s Hope orbit and the Chinese Tianwen – 1 orbit, Lander and rover.
Although all are very exciting, Ingenuity will be the first helicopter ever sent into space. NASA expects it to hit Mars on February 18.
Fly on new horizons
“NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is the first aircraft to send humanity to another planet to take on powered, controlled flights,” NASA explained in a press release. “If the experimental flight test program succeeds, the returned data could benefit the future exploration of the Red Planet – including that by astronauts – by adding the air dimension, which is not available today.”
The helicopter is quite small, similar to a medium-sized commercial drone, and is equipped with two carbon fiber rotors. It rotates at about 2400 rpm in different directions to stabilize the craft during the flight. The rotational speed is many times faster than that used by passenger helicopters on Earth, due to their smaller size and both the thin atmosphere of Mars. Since the air is thinner there, rotors have to do a lot of extra work to generate the same elevators that they would produce on our planet.
If all goes well, the ingenuity can completely change how we explore Mars and other planets with atmosphere. Until now, we use rovers, which have quite a few advantages (ground vehicles have a high energy efficiency, as it is not necessary to stay up, and for example weight is less). However, they are also much slower than other vehicles in general because they deal with off-road functions. If Ingenuity succeeds in doing its job, and doing it well – and especially if it can withstand the harsh environment of Mars, space helicopters will certainly become much more common in the future.
But until then, perseverance must still reach its target, and Ingenuity must still prove that it can fly on Mars. Holding thumbs.