NASA’s Perseverance Rover is preparing to deploy a mini-helicopter called Chaturya on Mars. The four-pound, four-blade rotorcraft will attempt its first flight of its kind on another planet, and in the process, it will test a new mode of mobility that could change the way we Earthlings explore other worlds remotely.
The craft is currently attached to Perseverance’s belly, which landed on Mars’ Jezero pit in February. One of the first steps toward departure on its inaugural flight of the baby helicopter came this week when diligently leaving a protective shell to expose ingenuity for the first time in bright Martian sunlight. “The debris is gone, and here’s our first look at the helicopter,” Rover’s Twitter account said Sunday.
The wreckage shield goes away, and here is our first look at the helicopter. It’s owed to the side, folded and locked in place, so I have to do some contrast origami before I can set it up. First though, I’ll go to the designated “helipad” from here, a few days from here. pic.twitter.com/E9zZGQk5jQ
– NASA Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASA Perseverance) March 21, 2021
After leaving the wreckage, he will diligently drive himself into the driving flight zone for a few days, which NASA officials plan to unveil at a press conference on Tuesday. The helicopter will land on the ground, and the diligence will move to a safe distance of about 330 feet, leaving the ingenuity to unlock its rotor blade and conduct a few spin tests. NASA expects the first test flights to arrive “not earlier than the first week of April,” a statement said.
The artificial boundaries of the flight zone, wherever they are, will be a 50-foot-long oval patch of land, which will require ingenuity during flight tests. The force will land the helicopter near one end of the flight zone, calling the helipad to space engineers.
Deploying the first helicopter to Mars is not an easy task. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a team of ingenious engineers calculated a Martian atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth, meaning that the craft needed to work harder than a ground-bound helicopter to lift itself off the ground.
And it’s not just a more powerful toy drone: the ingenuity is the $ 85 million spacecraft built to cope with the most turbulent rides on Mars – from last summer’s violent turbulence during a liftoff from Earth to Mars’ seven-minute landing in the Martian atmosphere. Its design also complies with the International Space Station Treaty of 1967, which requires signatures to ensure that their spacecraft does not contaminate other planetary environments.
“This was a design challenge that covered the boundaries of both aircraft and spacecraft,” says Bon Balaram, chief engineer of ingenuity. The team’s biggest challenge, he said, is building a craft that can spin its blades enough to produce fast thrust, while keeping the overall design simple and light in weight – “otherwise the lift you produce is good. Won’t work if you got it too. Heavy in process in design. ”
Packing all that power into the craft’s four-pound body is made possible by the rectangular solar panel installed above the craft’s four carbon fiber blades. That panel also has a small telecommunications device that can communicate with the node on the body of the perceiver known as the Mars helicopter base station, as far as nine football fields away. The base station will help relay signals back to Earth.
Beneath the blade is a tissue box-sized fuselage that holds a flight sensor, two cameras, a battery and a mini “survival heater” that protects the ingenuity from freezing during the night on Mars, where temperatures drop to minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit. One of the two cameras has a 13-megapixel color camera that will face the horizon and send images in perseverance mid-flight (the other camera has a 0.5-megapixel black and white sensor for navigation).
Overall, the ingenuity will attempt to do five flight tests within a short, 30-day window. If the tests work, the same helicopter tech can be used to track other missions, where wheeled rovers cannot reach caves, tunnels or mountain ranges. Even if the tests are massively successful, the ingenuity will not fly again after the 30-day window. As Balaram says, “We are being included by the main flagship mission, which is a huge, new astrological research ahead.” Exploring Mars’ Jezero crater and packing soil samples into small, cigar-sized sample tubes that will spread around the surface for a future “fence” rover to send the rover back to Earth.
After that 30-day window, ingenuity will remain eternally on the surface of Mars. If the craft’s first flight attempt doesn’t work, Balaram said his team can still celebrate the number of achievements they’ve made.
“I think the main thing is, we’ve already achieved a lot of goals by having a design that can do all these things, and we’ve had a successful testing program so far,” he said. “Every step is something to celebrate because something is not given. It’s a fairly high-risk, high-reward activity. And tech demos are inherently risky adventures, they’re not slam dunk. “
