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Later this week, NASA plans to launch its fourth rover from Mars, Perseverance, on a six-month trip to the Red Planet. Perseverance will initiate a mission to collect samples of Martian soil that may have traces of ancient life, so that they can be returned to Earth by another mission later this decade. It will also carry a different payload than anything that has been propelled into space: a small autonomous helicopter called Ingenio. Sometime next spring, probably April, Ingenuity will spin its rotor blades and become the first spacecraft to fly on Mars.
“I see it as a kind of Wright brothers moment on another planet,” says Bob Balaram, chief engineer for the Mars helicopter project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It is a high risk, high reward mission that could allow us to go to many places we have not been able to go before.”
Satellites are good at gaining a global understanding of a planet, and rovers are great at exploring a relatively small amount of terrain in minute detail. For everything else, it helps to have an airborne system. A rover can only cover a few dozen kilometers over the course of several years, but future alien drones could easily cover it in one day. They could take aerial snapshots to help a rover map out the best path, or collect samples and return them to a fixed lander for analysis. Wit cannot do any real science, but it is the first step toward an alien plane that can.
The hardware of the mill (cameras, communications equipment, avionics) is stuffed into a small cube that will be suspended in the air by four thin legs that make it look like a robotic insect. Above are two pairs of rotor blades, each four feet in diameter, sandwiched between the Ingenuity body and a rectangular solar panel. The entire apparatus weighs less than a full two-liter soda bottle, but is rugged enough to withstand the extreme environments it will face during launch, landing, and its everyday existence on the Martian surface.
Once Perseverance reaches Mars, you’ll spend a few weeks going through its systems. If everything looks good, your first business will be to find a clearing in Jezero’s rocky crater to drop off your passenger. (And it will literally drop: the helicopter is connected to the belly of the scout vehicle.) Once the scout vehicle and helicopter are separated, the days of the helicopter are numbered. Balaram and his team will only have one month to complete up to five test flights. “The whole intention of this campaign is to obtain engineering data so that we can say that it worked the way we thought and that there were no surprises on Mars,” says Balaram. “Beyond 30 days, we would be a distraction.”
Like the famous Wright brothers’ flight test in Kitty Hawk, on their first flight, Ingenuity will only be in the air for a few seconds. This jump will be an almost exact replica of the flight tests Balaram and his crew did on Earth so they can make an apple-to-apple comparison of helicopter performance against expectations. If all goes well, Ingenuity will attempt increasingly challenging flight profiles. The helicopter is designed to fly up to 15 feet in the air and can travel up to three soccer fields from its take-off point. Its batteries limit it to only 90 seconds of flight time, but this will be more than enough for the types of flight demonstrations it will do on Mars.
For Balaram, the first Martian flight has been slow to arrive. He prepared a plan for an alien helicopter in the late 1990s, although the idea was not exactly new, after seeing a conference presentation by Ilan Kroo, a Stanford University aerospace engineer who had spent the past few years working on a coin. A sizeable atmospheric research drone called a mesicopter. As Kroo and his team knew very well from their research, the aerodynamics become thick on a small scale, making it difficult to control the flight. “We soon realized that mesi-scale flying devices on Earth were very similar, at least aerodynamically, to flying larger vehicles on Mars,” says Kroo. “We started working with Bob Balaram and the Jet Propulsion Lab to take our little rotor designs and scale them up to fly on Mars.”
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