NASA’s new Mars rover is about to give birth to a small helicopter

NASA’s Perseverance rover is preparing to deploy a mini-helicopter named Ingenuity to Mars. The four-pound, four-bladed rotorcraft will attempt the first flight of its kind on another planet, and in doing so, will test a new mode of mobility that could transform the way we Earthlings remotely explore other worlds.

The craft is currently attached to the belly of Perseverance, which landed at Mars Jezero Crater in February. One of the first steps towards starting the baby helicopter for its first flight came this weekend when Perseverance dropped a protective shell and exposed Ingenuity to Martian sunlight for the first time. “Away from the debris shield, and here’s our first look at the helicopter,” the rover’s Twitter account said on Sunday.

After dropping the debris shield, Perseverance will spend a few days getting to the Ingenuity flight zone, which NASA officials plan to unveil at a press conference on Tuesday. The helicopter will be lowered to the ground and Perseverance will pull away to a safe distance of approximately 330 feet, leaving Ingenuity to unlock its rotor blades and perform some spin tests. NASA expects the first test flights to take place “no earlier than the first week of April,” a statement said.

The man-made boundaries of the flight zone, wherever it is, will be a 50-foot-long oval terrain in which Ingenuity must remain during its flight tests. Perseverance will drop the helicopter near one end of this flight zone, in a space engineers call the helipad.

Deploying the first helicopter to Mars is no easy task. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Ingenuity team of engineers had to account for a Martian atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth’s, meaning the craft must work much harder than helicopters. terrestrial to lift off the ground.

And it’s not just a more powerful toy drone: Ingenuity is an $ 85 million spacecraft built to withstand an extremely turbulent ride to Mars – from the loud rumble as it lifted off from Earth last summer to the footage. Perseverance’s seven-minute landing through the atmosphere of Mars in February. Its design must also comply with the 1967 International Outer Space Treaty, which obliges signatories to ensure that their spacecraft does not contaminate environments on other planets.

“It was a design challenge that straddled both aircraft and spacecraft limitations,” says Bob Balaram, chief engineer at Ingenuity. The team’s biggest challenge, he said, was to create a craft that could spin its blades fast enough to generate thrust, while keeping the overall design simple and light – “if not, whatever. the lift you generate is of no use if you have too much of it in the design process. “

Packing all that power into the craft’s four-pound body is made possible by a rectangular solar panel mounted above the craft’s four carbon-fiber blades. This panel also contains a small telecommunications device that can communicate with a node on Perseverance’s body called the Mars Helicopter Base Station, even from as far away as nine football fields. The base station will help relay signals back to Earth.

Underneath the blades is a tissue box-sized fuselage that houses flight sensors, dual cameras, batteries, and mini “survival heaters” that protect Ingenuity from freezing overnight on Mars, where temperatures drop as low as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit. One of the two cameras has a 13 megapixel color camera facing the horizon that will take photos and send images to Perseverance during flight (the other camera has a black and white sensor of 0, 5 megapixels used for navigation).

In total, Ingenuity will attempt to perform five flight tests in a short period of 30 days. If the tests work, similar helicopter technology could be used in other missions, to cover places wheeled rovers cannot reach, such as caves, tunnels or mountain peaks. Ingenuity will no longer fly after its 30 day window, even if the tests are extremely successful. This is because “we are greeted by a major flagship mission that has a huge and new astrobiological exploration ahead of it,” Balaram says. Perseverance’s main mission is to explore Mars’ Jezero crater and pack soil samples into tiny cigar-sized sample tubes that the rover will scatter on the surface for a future rover to “search”. to be sent back to Earth.

After this 30 day window, Ingenuity will remain on the Martian surface for eternity. If the craft’s first attempt at theft doesn’t work, Balaram said her team can still celebrate a number of achievements they’ve already made.

“I think the bottom line is that we’ve already hit a lot of milestones just by having a design that could do all of these things, and we’ve had a successful testing program so far,” he said. “Each step is something to celebrate because nothing is taken for granted. It is a fairly risky and very profitable type of activity. And tech demos are inherently a pretty risky business, they’re not slam dunks. “