Red Planet Record Helicopters! NASA’s Creative Mars Helicopter Reaches Airborne Milestone Never Seen As Attainable

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NASA Mars Helicopter Creativity Illustration. Credit: NASA/JPL

NASA’s Innovative Mars Helicopter reaches a total of 30 minutes’ altitude

With its final seventeenth flight, the Red Planet helicopter had reached an important stage in the atmosphere that the team had never considered achievable.

The 17th flight of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter on December 5 exceeded the total flight time beyond the 30-minute mark. The 117-second flight brought the first aircraft in history to operate from the surface of another world closer to its home airfield, Wright Brothers Field, where it will await the arrival of the agency’s Mars Perseverance rover, which is currently exploring the “South Sittah” region of Mars’ Jezero Crater. .

Combined with a buildup of 30 minutes and 48 seconds of flight time, the pilot helicopter traveled above the surface 2.2 miles (3,592 meters), flying at an altitude of 40 feet (12 meters) and at speeds of up to 10 miles per hour (5 meters each). Secondly).

The helicopter’s condition was not confirmed after the December 5 flight due to an unexpected outage in the in-flight data stream as the helicopter landed towards the surface at the end of its flight. Perseverance serves as a communications station for the helicopter base with controllers on the ground. A handful of radio data packets later received by the craft suggested a healthy helicopter on the surface but did not provide enough information for the team to declare the flight a success.

The creation sits on a slightly sloping roof with a tilt of about 6 degrees in the center of the frame, north of the southern edge of the geological unit “Séíitah”. The Perseverance craft’s Mastcam-Z instrument captured this image on December 1, 2021, when the helicopter was about 970 feet (295 meters) away. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

This is the same image above, but with creativity accentuated. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

But data associated with mission engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Friday, Dec. 10, indicate that Flight 17 was a success and creativity is in excellent shape.

The 30-minute mark far exceeds the original plans for the 4 lb (1.8 kg) helicopter. Designed to be a technology demonstration of up to five test flights, Ingenuity flew for the first time on April 19, 2021, with a short jump up and down to demonstrate that powered and controlled flight on Mars was possible. The next four test flights widened the rotor’s flight envelope, making flights increasingly longer with more complex maneuvers, helping engineers at JPL better understand its performance.

With the sixth flight, the helicopter has embarked on a new operational demonstration stage, to investigate how atmospheric exploration and other functions can be used for future exploration of Mars and other worlds. In this new chapter, the helicopter worked from airfields south of Wright Brothers Field, exploring rocky outcrops and other geological features of interest to the Perseverance Vehicle science team.

“Few people thought we’d get to flight number one, and even fewer to five. Nobody thought we’d get that far,” said JPL chief creative officer Teddy Zanitos. High altitude, the Creativity survived eight months of bitter cold, and was operated from nine unique Martian airfields. The aircraft’s ongoing operations are indicative of the determination, diligence and passion of our small operations team.”

Flight 18

The flight is scheduled to cover another 18,754 feet (230 metres) at 5.6 mph (2.5 meters per second) in 125 seconds. The new airport, close to Siita’s northern border, will be the tenth helipad on Mars.

As with the previous effort, Flight 18 will push the limits of Ingenuity Radio’s range and performance. To give it the best chance of maintaining a link during the descent, the Mars Helicopter team modified the flight sequence to communicate in low data rate mode, which will provide an additional signal strength boost for the wireless link.

“If we lose radio communication on landing, it can take several days or weeks for the line of sight between creativity and persistence to improve enough to attempt a communication session,” Tzanitos said. “While the delay in post-flight data analysis is annoying, it is not unexpected and it has become the new normal as we continue to work on challenging terrain in the coming weeks.”

More about creativity

The Ingenuity Mars helicopter was built by JPL’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is also running this technology demonstration project for NASA Headquarters. It is supported by NASA’s Science, Aeronautics, and Space Technology Mission Directorates. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia provided critical flight performance analysis and technical assistance during the development of Ingenuity. AeroVironment Inc. Qualcomm and SolAero also assist with the design and key vehicle components. Lockheed Space designed and manufactured the Mars Helicopter Delivery System.

At NASA Headquarters, Dave Lavery is the Executive Director of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Program.

More about perseverance

Astrobiology is one of the main goals of the persistence mission to Mars, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and will be the first mission to collect Martian rocks and regolith (fractured rock and dust) and store them in a cache.

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with the European Space Agency ESA, will send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for deep analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Lunar-to-Mars Exploration Approach, which includes the Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, operated by the NASA-administered California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, built and operated the rover’s operations.

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