From nasa Perseverance Rover It will have a special passenger when it lands inside the Jezero Crater of Mars in February 2021, the first helicopter to fly in another world.
The 4-pound one. Chopper (1.8 kg), called wit, will travel to Mars in the belly of Perseverance, squeezing in a location that offers approximately 24 inches (61 centimeters) of ground clearance, including the helicopter delivery system. The wit itself is only 5 inches (12 cm) shorter than the free area.
“There is not much room to play,” Chris Salvo, the leader of the Mars 2020 helicopter interface, the official name of the Perseverance mission, he said in a statement.
“But we found that if you connect the helicopter horizontally, there is enough to do the job,” said Salvo, who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
Related: Perseverance of NASA’s Mars 2020 rover in pictures
Ingenuity will continue to hold on to Perseverance for approximately two months after the rover’s landing on February 18, 2021. The two machines (with the help of remote operators on Earth) will search for a flat, unobstructed area where Ingenuity can conduct test operations.
The team will need to find an area that is about 33 feet by 33 feet (10 by 10 meters) that Perseverance can monitor while parked on a football field, mission team members said. The deployment of ingenuity will occur after Perseverance drives to the center of the airfield. Operators will spend about six ground days reviewing all systems before preparing the helicopter for flight.
“The deployment process begins with the release of a locking mechanism that holds the helicopter in place,” JPL officials wrote in the statement. “A pyrotechnic wire-cutting device is then fired, allowing a spring-loaded arm holding the helicopter to begin to rotate Ingenuity out of its horizontal position. Along the way, a small electric motor will pull the arm until it is lock, bringing the body of the helicopter completely upright with two of its spring-loaded landing legs deployed. Another fireworks, releasing the other legs. “
During this process, the deployment system will maintain electrical and data connections between Perseverance and Ingenuity until it is time to drop the helicopter. The plan is to gently drop the wit to the surface and make the perseverance go away, allowing the wit to charge its batteries with a solar panel. Then, if everything goes according to plan, it will be time to do some test flights.
The mill is designed to operate for 30 soles, or Martian days, to see how feasible the Red Planet flight will be for future missions. Engineers will use the lessons learned from Ingenuity, which has no instruments on board, to potentially build future helicopters that can help rovers and perhaps even astronauts.
Some possible uses for future helicopters from Mars They include exploring difficult terrain, studying vertical cliffs, and exploring caves or deep craters that a rover will not be able to reach, NASA officials said.
The main goals of perseverance include searching for signs of antiquity Life on Mars and caching of promising samples for the future return to Earth. The rover also offers technological demonstrations that could help future human explorers on the Red Planet, including an instrument designed to produce oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide. NASA aims to put boots on Mars sometime in the 2030s, after returning astronauts to the moon in this decade.
Perseverance will be launched to Mars not before July 30 of this year, finally joined NASA’s long-running Curiosity rover on the surface of the red planet. Curiosity landed in August 2012 and is still getting stronger.
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