9/11/2023 0 Comments Mars helicopter ingenuityHe and some colleagues proposed the idea of a Mars helicopter to NASA in the early 2000s and got a year of funding to work on it, but ultimately the money dried up and the idea was shelved. That required safety innovations like only charging batteries to full power just before flights to ensure Ingenuity’s lithium ion batteries had no opportunities to overcharge and explode like the smartphones of yore.īalaram first had the idea that would become the backbone of Ingenuity’s design in the 1990s. Designers also needed to make the helicopter would not endanger Perseverance’s $2.5 billion mission. ![]() “He made it clear they needed to figure it out without the extra three grams,” recalls Aung.Īnother big challenge the JPL team faced was making Ingenuity almost totally autonomous, because it takes a minimum of five minutes for signals to reach Mars. Perseverance drops Ingenuity off on the Martian surface in this illustration.Īung recalls a full-blown argument breaking out between the normally mild-mannered Balaram and members of the telecommunications team who made the mistake of requesting an extra three grams (around 0.1 ounces) for their equipment. Support the Smithsonian with these exclusive designs celebrating the Red Planet's latest rover. “It’s an aircraft that also needed to be a bona fide spacecraft.” “Everything we did to make it incredibly lightweight was countered by the need to make it strong enough to withstand launch and the trip to Mars,” says Balaram. What became the governing law of the project emerged from the need to fit Ingenuity underneath the Perseverance rover, which capped the width of Ingenuity’s rotors at four feet and in turn restricted lift. No matter what, the helicopter had to weigh four pounds or less. Though Martian gravity is only around a third of what we experience on Earth, reducing Ingenuity’s weight was a constant obsession for those on the project, says Aung. To create a helicopter that could fly on Mars the team faced a variety of challenges, from making the vehicle almost completely autonomous to trimming the craft down to an ultralight weight. The final product sports two stacked rotors featuring blades roughly four feet in diameter that spin in opposite directions at 2,400 revolutions per minute.īut generating enough lift wasn’t the team’s only concern. To generate enough lift, Aung and a team of engineers led by JPL’s Bob Balaram had to redesign traditional rotorcraft down to the very shape and material of the rotor blades, while also dramatically cranking up how fast those blades spin. “You can’t just scale a helicopter designed to fly on Earth and expect it to work on Mars,” says MiMi Aung, the project’s manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). But on Mars the air is just one percent the density of Earth’s-so thin that flying there is the equivalent of trying to take off at 100,000 feet. ![]() If the Wright Brothers comparison seems overwrought, consider the following: no helicopter has ever flown higher than around 40,000 feet on our planet. If all goes well, Ingenuity will usher in a new era of exploration of Mars’ rugged terrain-going where rovers can’t and giving some of the planet’s treacherous features, such as its huge lava tubes, a closer inspection. The helicopter is what’s known as a technology demonstration, which means that successfully showing its capabilities in a series of test flights is its only mission. The pint-sized helicopter is currently strapped to the underside of NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is rocketing towards the Red Planet with an expected arrival date of February 18. Ingenuity, a four-pound helicopter, will attempt the first ever flight in another planet’s atmosphere when it reaches Mars. Now, NASA is set to prove that it can happen on another planet. ![]() It’s been nearly 120 years since the Wright Brothers proved that controlled, powered flight was possible on Earth.
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