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Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California have set a helicopter drone flying in the belly of the Mars 2020 aircraft scheduled to be launched next July.
The solar-powered Mars helicopter is about 80 centimeters tall when deployed and will become the first plane to fly to another planet. The drone robot will travel to the red planet with NASA's March 2020 rover, which was assembled at JPL to begin testing in the coming weeks.
The launch of the Mars 2020 mission in Cape Canaveral is scheduled for July 17, 2020, the first day of a nearly three-week window allowing the rover to leave Earth for Mars. The rover will take off at the top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.
The installation of the Mars helicopter under the Mars Rover aircraft on August 27 was one of the last tasks of the mission integration team at JPL. Engineers will submit the craft to a series of pre-flight checks, starting with a vibration test with the rover attached to its crane descent stage, the same type of landing vehicle that delivered the Curiosity rover in March in 2012.
"Thanks to the junction of two large spaceships, I can say unequivocally that all the elements are in place for a historic exploration mission," said Thomas Zurbuchen, deputy administrator of the scientific mission's headquarters directorate. from NASA to Washington. "Together, Mars 2020 and the Mars helicopter will help define the future of science and the exploration of the red planet for decades to come."
The main goals of the March 2020 mission include looking for signs of the old microbial life on Mars. The rover will collect rock samples for recovery by a future mission to bring the specimens back to Earth and test a device to generate oxygen from the carbon dioxide contained in the Martian atmosphere. .
NASA officials approved the addition of the helicopter to the Mars 2020 mission last year.
Equipped with a pair of counter-rotating blades, the mini-helicopter is a technological demonstration experience. When the rover arrives on Mars on February 18, 2021, he will drop the drone onto the Martian surface and lead to a safe distance, continuing his own independent scientific investigations of the helicopter.
A cover will protect the helicopter from debris during the entrance, descent and landing of the rover on Mars.
"Our job is to prove that autonomous and controlled flight can be performed in an extremely thick Martian atmosphere," said MiMi Aung, Mars Helicopter Project Manager at JPL. "Because our helicopter is designed as an experimental technology flight test, it does not carry any scientific instruments. But if we prove that motorized flying on Mars can work, we look forward to the day when Mars helicopters can play an important role in future explorations of the red planet. "
The helicopter will fly autonomously, without real-time intervention of ground controllers located millions of miles away. The drone carries two cameras and the telemetry of the helicopter will be routed via a base station located on the mobile.
The atmosphere on the Martian surface represents about 1% of the density of the Earth, which limits the performance of a rotorcraft such as the Mars helicopter.
The rotors of the Mars helicopter will run between 2,400 and 2,900 rpm, about 10 times faster than a helicopter flying in the Earth's atmosphere. The altitude record for a helicopter on Earth is about 40,000 feet.
According to NASA, the future Mars helicopters could carry scientific instruments and serve as scouts for rovers and possibly for humans, exploring the red planet. Drones could explore cliffs, caves and deep craters, places where it might be too risky to send an expensive crew or rover, NASA said in a statement.
Aerial imagery could also help locate obstacles for rovers that cross the Martian surface.
The March helicopter demonstration is not the only flying robot that NASA is developing to send it to another world.
Earlier this year, NASA approved the development of a mission called Dragonfly, which will use a rotorcraft to fly over the atmosphere of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.
Unlike the Mars helicopter, Dragonfly is a full-fledged research mission boasting its own suite of scientific instruments. Titan is covered with a thicker atmosphere than Earth, making it a more favorable environment for a rotorcraft than Mars.
But Saturn being more than six times further from the sun than Mars, the designers plan to rely on a nuclear generator to propel Dragonfly around Titan.
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.
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