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New Delhi, February 19
With the successful landing of its Perseverance Mars rover on Friday, NASA will become the first global space agency to fly a drone in the atmosphere of another planet, a breakthrough that could pave the way for future “tandem exploration” missions that they include new methods of ground and air surveillance.
As the rover examines and searches for evidence of past life around the Jezero crater on Mars, an ancient lake bed believed to once contain liquid water, the expected flight of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars in 31 days will be a demonstrator. test, the space had said the agency.
The 1.8 kilogram helicopter is approximately 0.49 meters tall with two rotor blades of approximately 1.2 meters wingspan stacked on top of each other.
“Although Ingenuity is a technology demonstration, which means that we are trying to demonstrate a new technology and not necessarily doing any scientific data collection, the inspiration came from future science and operational consideration,” said Goutam Chattopadhyay, principal research scientist at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, he said.
Over the course of its mission, Ingenuity is expected to make five flight attempts each lasting approximately 90 seconds in a row.
While NASA already conducts several reconnaissance missions to choose exploration sites on other planets before sending rovers to them, Chattopadhyay said these ground vehicles don’t have the ability to go alone, hoping to find “something interesting.”
He believes this is where drones can enter the scene in future planetary exploration missions.
“Now if we have a helicopter or a flying vehicle that can turn around, watch a bit, send that data back to the rover, and then the rover makes the decision to keep exploring some areas based on that data, it will be a lot. more interesting, “explained the NASA scientist.
However, NASA engineers, including JPL’s J (Bob) Balaram, say there are several new challenges to flying a fully autonomous drone in the Martian atmosphere that are not found here on Earth.
Balaram and his colleagues explain these challenges in a study describing the design, development and testing of the Mars helicopter, published on the Aerospace Research Central website.
The research, presented at the 2019 SciTech Forum of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, noted that the thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide on the red planet is about 1 percent of the density of Earth’s atmosphere, equivalent to the density of the air from the Earth at an altitude of 35 km.
“Since this is a very thin atmosphere, we really can’t fly anything very high on Mars,” added Indian astrophysicist Dibyendu Nandi.
He explained that airplanes and helicopters fly according to the principle of lift based on Newton’s third law of motion: for the lift force to push the helicopter upwards, a force equal to pushing the air down must be applied.
“If the density of the atmosphere is reduced by half, the elevation is reduced by half. So if a planet has a weak atmosphere, getting the lifting force will always be a problem. The drones must be able to move greater amounts of air. what to do on Earth, “said Nandi, a scientist at the Indian Institutes of Education and Scientific Research (IISER) in Calcutta.
While Mars’s weaker gravitational pull – 38% of Earth’s – is an advantage, he said helicopters destined for Mars still need to weigh much less with blades that can rotate much faster and consume as little power as possible. .
“For example, the rotor of a helicopter on Earth rotates at 400-600 rotations per minute. While on Mars, the blades must rotate at 2,600 rpm. This is a great challenge,” added Chattopadhyay.
To test the drone’s performance under Martian conditions, NASA scientists evacuated a near-vacuum chamber and filled it with carbon dioxide gas at a density representative of the Red Planet’s atmosphere.
According to NASA engineers, the helicopter also had to be vacuum-compatible and able to survive very low temperatures of down to minus 100 degrees Celsius.
“Therefore, the materials used to build vehicles for Mars expand and contract between day and night and can place severe physical stress on the structure of these vehicles,” Nandi added.
In the JPL Space Simulator, the engineers also tested the helicopter’s aerial performance in a variety of conditions, including its response to winds and higher speed forward flight by placing it in front of a series of small fans capable of producing winds of up to approximately 10 meters per second.
And drones built for such missions must also be completely autonomous.
“We can’t really drive the vehicle live here because of the long distance related time delay. The helicopter flies autonomously using a gyroscope, accelerometer, camera, altimeter and on-board computer,” Chattopadhyay explained.
He said the autonomous system developed for Ingenuity uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, which he said can help design better lightweight and efficient drones here on Earth to deliver drugs, transport organs for transplantation and other uses.
Just as the Sojourner rover on the 1997 Pathfinder mission paved the way for numerous Mars rovers, scientists believe the demonstration of Ingenuity technology may open the doors for future drone missions to other planets. PTI
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