After a long-distance debugging, the NASA Ingenuity Mars helicopter will attempt its first flight to another world on Monday, in a demonstration that could open the door to a new era of interplanetary air scouts.
Engineers at NASA’s California Jet Propulsion Laboratory picked up orders for Ingenuity’s test flight on Sunday, preparing the scene for a short jump up and down at 3:31 am EDT (0731 GMT) Monday.
Ground crews will receive almost three hours to receive data confirming the flight result. The signals will jump from the helicopter to the Perseverance rover, which launched the drone on the Martian surface on April 3, then to an orbiter flying overhead to relay the data to Earth.
NASA TV will broadcast live coverage of JPL’s operations center starting at 6:15 AM EDT (1015 GMT) Monday, while officials await data on the results of the Ingenuity hop. Once the data begins to flow, the engineers will analyze the signals for the indicator signature that the helicopter took and landed successfully.
Then, the images will start to be played back to Earth from the cameras on board the Ingeniousness and the cameras on the Perseverance rover that observe the flight from a range of about 60 meters.
NASA officials expect the fully automated flight to last Monday, about 40 seconds, as the drone takes off at an altitude of about 3 meters, currently glides there, then rotates to indicate a different direction before landing back on the four legs of fiber.
The first images from the helicopter’s black-and-white navigation camera could return to Earth shortly after the test flight on Monday. Then the boat will sleep and recharge its batteries before transmitting color images.
Meanwhile, an enlarged high-definition camera on the mast of the Perseverance rover will try to capture still images and videos of the helicopter’s flight.
“We are really excited,” said Tim Canham, head of operations at Ingenuity at JPL. “It could be an amazing day. We are all nervous, but we are confident that we put in the work and the time and have the right people to do the job. ”
If the first flight is as successful as NASA hopes, Ingenuity could fly four more times in the coming weeks, trying bolder flight profiles before ending the test flight campaign next month. Then, NASA wants to release Perseverance to continue its main scientific mission to find and collect evidence of Martian stone for a possible return to Earth.
Lori Glaze, head of NASA’s planetary science division, described the ingenious helicopter as a “high-risk, high-reward” experiment that could pave the way for future aircraft to explore Mars and other planets.
The $ 80 million Ingenuity helicopter weighs just 1.8 kilograms. It weighs 4 kilograms on Earth, or 1.5 kilograms in Martian weight, but its light blades will have to generate an atmosphere less than 1% the density of the Earth at sea level.
Bobby Braun, director of planetary science at JPL, said the helicopter and its back-to-Earth support team will try to produce a “Wright brothers moment” in another world.
Recognizing the Ingenuity flight as another aviation, NASA installed on the helicopter Mars a piece of post-sized fabric from the Wright brothers’ first plane, known as the Flyer. The fabric covered one of the wings of the aircraft during its first flight to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903.
Another piece of fabric and a piece of spruce wood from the Wright Flyer flew to the moon on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. While the Wright brothers used fabrics and wood for their planes, the ingenuity is made of carbon fiber skins. and “exotic metals,” said Bob Balaram, JPL’s chief engineer at JPL.
Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s scientific division, called Ingenuity’s first flight attempt “a historic moment whose analogues have analogies in 1903 – controlled flight to another planet.”
Since Perseverance launched the ingenious helicopter from its belly earlier this month, the rotorcraft has proven that it can recharge its batteries using a solar panel and that it can warm up on the cold night of Mars. Ground crews also sent commands to unlock the rotor blades, which stretch for nearly 1.2 meters, from tip to tip, for a 50 rpm low-speed spin test.
But a problem disrupted the start-up sequence of the drone’s rotor on Mars during a high-speed rotation attempt on April 9th. , then scheduled for April 11.
The command sequence for the high-speed spin test ended early as the helicopter tried to switch the flight computer from “pre-flight” mode to “flight” mode, according to NASA. A watchdog timing system designed to monitor the control sequence expired before the centrifugation test was completed, prematurely terminating the helicopter’s centrifugation test.
The JPL teams designed two tactics to solve the command sequence problem. One approach involves adjusting the command sequence to “slightly change the timing” of the helicopter’s transition from pre-flight to flight mode, according to MiMi Aung, Ingenuity’s project manager.
The other solution is the disturbing movement and it would further delay the first flight of the helicopter. This option is to reinstall the modified software in Ingenuity’s flight computer, replacing the code that worked perfectly for the helicopter for almost two years, Aung wrote in a post on NASA’s website.
Testing the flight using the modified command sequence is easier and worked on Friday during a successful test with high-speed rotation of the helicopter rotors at almost 2,500 rpm. Testing shows that the solution will allow the helicopter to switch to flight mode and take off in 85% of tests
“We also know that if the first test doesn’t work on Monday, we can try these commands again, with a high probability that subsequent tests in the next few days will work even if the first one doesn’t work,” Aung wrote. “For these reasons, we have chosen to follow this path.”
Meanwhile, teams on Earth continue to pursue the backup option of updating the Ingenuity software. The new software has already been connected to the Perseverance rover, which could transmit the code to ingenuity via the rover-helicopter wireless communications link, if necessary.
“If our initial approach to flight doesn’t work, the rover will send the new flight control software to the helicopter,” Aung wrote. “We will need a few more days of training to load and test the new software ingeniously, to redo the rotor tests in this new configuration, and to recycle for a first flight attempt.”
Aung compared the test flight attempt to a rocket launch.
“We do everything we can to be successful, but we also know that we may have to wash and try again,” she wrote. “In engineering, there is always uncertainty, but this makes working on advanced technology so interesting and rewarding. We must constantly innovate and develop solutions to new challenges. And we will try things that others have dreamed of. ”
“Ingenuity is a technological experiment,” Aung wrote. “As such, our plan is to push the envelope and learn by working. We take risks that other missions cannot, carefully weighing each step ”.
If all goes well, the carbon fiber rotors will rotate almost 40 times per second to lift the ingenious helicopter off the ground. The rotor blades themselves have a mass of only 35 gains or a weight of just over 1 ounce and must rotate faster than the rotors of the helicopter on Earth.
“A rotorcraft flies generating an elevator,” Aung said. “On Earth it is by pushing the air, so that the blades push the air and the elevator is generated. On Mars, where the atmospheric density is so thin – about 1% compared to here – there are practically fewer push molecules. So that means we have to compensate … We have to spin much faster than we do on Earth. “
The super-light weight of the helicopter, combined with fast control algorithms to regulate the ship’s flight 500 times per second, requires advanced materials and computing power.
“I just couldn’t do that 15 or 20 years ago,” Aung said.
Email the author.
Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.