NASA space helicopter is one month away from landing on Mars

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 – the ingenuity of NASA, “the Mars helicopter”, is one month away from landing on the Red Planet.

Ingenuity is currently aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover, the latest US rover to Mars. This is the first US mission to Mars since InSight of 2018, but it was only one of three missions sent to Mars in 2020 alongside the United Arab Emirates Orbiter Hope and Orbiter, the Chinese Tianwen-1 lander and rover.

While all of them are very exciting, Ingenuity will be the first helicopter to go into space, ever. NASA expects it to land on Mars on February 18.

Fly to new horizons

“NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is the first plane that humanity has sent to another planet to attempt powered and controlled flight,” said NASA in a press kit. “If its experimental flight test program is successful, the returned data could benefit future explorations of the Red Planet – including that of astronauts – by adding the aerial dimension, which is not available today.

The helicopter is quite small, similar to a medium to large commercial drone, and is equipped with two carbon fiber rotors. These will spin at around 2400 rpm in different directions in order to stabilize the craft in flight. This rotational speed is several times faster than those used by passenger helicopters on Earth, due to their smaller size and Mars’ thinner atmosphere. Since the air is thinner there, the rotors have to do a lot of extra work to generate the same lift they would produce on our planet.

If all goes well, Ingenuity could completely change the way we explore Mars and other planets with atmospheres. So far we are using rovers, which have a lot of advantages (land vehicles are very fuel efficient because they don’t need to stay in the air and weight is much less of an issue, for example). However, they are also much slower than all other vehicles in general, as they have to deal with the characteristics of the terrain. If Ingenuity manages to do its job and do 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 has yet to reach its goal, and Ingenuity has yet to prove that it can fly on Mars. Crossed fingers.