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Humanity’s first helicopter to Mars has been cleared for historic take-off.
Ingenuity will soar over Jezero Crater on Sunday April 11 on a 40-second flight – about four times longer than the Wright Brothers’ first flight to Earth over 117 years ago. The first data, whether successful or not, is expected to return to Earth on Monday (April 12) around 3:30 a.m. EDT (8:30 a.m. GMT).
The flight plan shows the Martian vortex hovering just 3 meters above the surface, collecting black-and-white data from landmarks below, as well as high-definition skyline video and data from engineering. The flight will also take place under the surveillance camera of the Perseverance rover, parked about 60 meters from the Ingenuity launch site.
Related: How to watch the first Mars Ingenuity helicopter flight online
“Naturally the team is working very hard to be ready for this moment [of flight], so when we see that first data, make it work… it’s going to be an incredible moment, ”said Tim Canham, Ingenuity’s operations manager, at a press conference broadcast live by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, Friday April 9.
We’ve imagined flight to Mars in fiction since at least 1890, when Robert Cromie’s “A Plunge Into Space” depicted Martian airships taking on a thin atmosphere. While the ingenuity of the size of a drone will be a simple stay up and down, the vision of its flight is no less ambitious.
The Martian atmosphere is barely 1% denser than Earth’s, so the helicopter must provide more lift than it would need to fly on Earth. The helicopter must also fly autonomously, as the controllers on Earth are stationed too far away to manipulate it around the crater. It must continue to recharge in the sun and survive nighttime surface temperatures of minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius). It took years of testing, more or less successful flights in inner tubes and a long journey to Mars to get this far.
MiMi Aung, Ingenuity project manager at JPL, said she would be very excited by the black and white camera footage the helicopter will bring back to Earth, showing her view from the air. “The pictures will be inspiring,” she said at the briefing, admitting that it will be hard to imagine what she will feel as the team did not try to take responsibility for the success of the ambitious test. in flight.
If Ingenuity is successful and transmits the data as expected, the black and white downward facing camera images will be taken approximately 30 times per second and will have the ability to track features on the surface; in the long run, once all of these images are on Earth, controllers will be able to estimate the speed and direction of movement by looking at the drift of the features.
There will also be a 13-megapixel camera on Ingenuity pointing towards the horizon, which will take a few photos during the flight. A lot of engineering data will also be collected with the images, such as altimeter readings – data that will be used for the benefit of future flying vehicles. NASA’s long-term vision is to use drones that could one day climb into areas beyond the reach of current rovers, such as potential regions of habitability on the desert-like Red Planet. Drones could spot robots and humans and help plot routes even more efficiently than we do today from orbit.
Ingenuity powered by solar energy will inform the design of these future robots. The helicopter team has 30 Martian soils (about 31 days on Earth) to make the first provisional flights. Assuming Ingenuity survives the first flight, it will rest and transmit data before attempting a second flight with lateral movement. The following flights will take place every three or four Martian grounds. The fifth flight – if Ingenuity goes that far – will be a chance to really fly away. “The likelihood is that it would be unlikely to land safely because we will be going into unsurveyed areas,” Aung said.
The ingenuity is the product of approximately five years of flight tests in altitude chambers simulating Martian conditions at JPL, including a test of the small helicopter itself in 2019 that went exactly as planned. Engineers thus know that it is theoretically possible to fly on Mars, and have a weather station available on Perseverance to approve or deviate the flight under current conditions, but there is always the element of uncertainty at the moment. .
Additional challenges come from firing everything from Ingenuity and Perseverance. For example, the rover’s scheduled five-minute flight video, in 4K definition, would take months to be sent back to Earth given the availability of Martian surface bandwidth through NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to ‘to NASA’s Deep Space Network of satellite dishes that pick up information from a distant spacecraft.
So JPL plans to instead pre-select some keyframes from that video and send them back, hoping that at least one of the frames represents Ingenuity taking to the air. The Mastcam-Z panoramic camera team also simulates shooting from afar, with the aim of getting ingenuity exactly in the distance frame, as it aims to capture zoomed in and zoomed out images at the same time.
Its best video resolution is seven frames per second, but only part of that frame will be captured and then compressed to be sent back to Earth. Already the practice is taking place; Mastcam-Z returned a short video of the helicopter spinning its blade at 50 rpm, but it was on the ground.
Getting the right angle to capture ingenuity in the air will be “really tough,” Elsa Jensen, head of Mastcam-Z uplink operations at Malin Space Science Systems, said at the same briefing. Mastcam-Z is designed for large swaths of terrain, while Ingenuity’s flight will only take place in a tiny portion of the overall view of the camera frame. “We hope everything goes well on Sunday, but we know there will be surprises. That’s what we trained for,” she said.
The rover team can also try to capture the sound of future Ingenuity flights with Perseverance’s SuperCam microphone, but there are no plans to do so for the first excursion. “It’s very easy if we can hear something from that distance,” Canham said, adding that discussions are ongoing on when to record. “The worst is worse, maybe we won’t get anything,” he joked of the audio footage.
The last time NASA took such an ambitious step on the Red Planet was with the Sojourner rover, a breadbox-sized vehicle that rolled over the surface for a few months in 1997 and s’ is nestled on the rocks like a little puppy.
This first Martian mobile vehicle was also a test to see if the rovers could tackle the rugged terrain of Mars away from Earth’s immediate aid. He performed beyond expectations, pioneering a generation of NASA rover explorers (Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and now Perseverance) who spotted water and signs of ancient habitability; Perseverance, if all goes according to plan, will be part of a larger sample return mission that will bring the rocks it hides back to Earth for detailed analysis.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, told the press conference that Ingenuity would play a similar role in NASA history, as Sojourner did. “We are ready for another historic moment,” he said.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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