Lasting 51.9 seconds, Ingenuity’s experimental flight on April 22, 2021 added several new challenges, such as trying to fly higher, staying in flight longer, and performing a lateral movement.
“So far, the engineering telemetry that we have received and analyzed tells us that the flight met expectations, ” says Bob Balaram, chief engineer for Ingenuity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
After its historic first powered flight in another world earlier this week, the helicopter from Mars took off and floated once more, this time higher and for longer. After sliding away from the center of “Wright Brothers Field” as the launch area has been named, Ingenuity also spun around, pointing its color camera in different directions . Then it returned to the center position and floated again.
“The helicopter stopped, froze, and turned to point its camera in different directions,” said Ingenuity chief pilot Dr. Håvard Grip, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Then he headed back to the center of the airfield to land. It sounds simple, but there are many unknowns about how to fly a helicopter on Mars. That is why we are here to make these unknowns known. “
The challenges of flying on Mars
Flying on Mars is particularly tricky due to the fact that its atmosphere is only 1% that of Earth at ground level , and although the lower gravity, one-third that of Earth, is only a partial offset against the very fine atmosphere. This means that to fly, the helicopter must be ultralight and turn its blades extremely fast, up to 2,500 rpm, to achieve lift.
The mission’s project leader, MiMi Aung, said that every image of the helicopter on Mars is special, but the most iconic is the one taken by the spacecraft showing its shadow on the surface.
Flight data and images are transmitted 278 million kilometers back to Earth , where they are received by NASA’s ground antenna array and processed.
Ingenuity traveled to Mars hidden under the belly of the Perseverance rover, which landed on the Red Planet on February 18 on a mission to search for signs of past microbial life and collect rock samples. Ingenuity’s goal, on the contrary, is to prove that its technology works. While its main maneuvers are pre-programmed, the little helicopter needs to make some decisions in real time using data from its sensors and camera. You also need to run a heater to survive nighttime temperatures that drop to 90 ° C at night.
And … the successors come
NASA is already preparing to send another, much larger landing helicopter under the name Dragonfly to Saturn’s icy moon Titan, where it will carry out multiple sorties in search of extraterrestrial life when it gets there in 2034.
Reference: NASA
