NASA’s ingenious helicopter makes its initial flight to Mars in a “Wright Brothers moment”

After overcoming a previous software error, NASA’s $ 80 million ingenious helicopter turned its carbon-rotating rotors and rose from the dusty surface of Mars early Monday to become the first plane to fly to another planet, a “Wright brothers moment.” Which could pave the way for future interplanetary planes.

Tilting the scale to just 4 pounds – 1.5 pounds in the lower weight of Mars – Ingenuity’s 4-foot counter rotating rotors, which rotate at more than 2,500 rpm, have been ordered to change course, ” biting ”deeper into the thin atmosphere. for a takeoff from the floor of Crater Lake around 03:30 EDT.

With Rover perseverance Looking from a safe distance, Ingeniousness climbed 10 feet straight up, glided, turned, and then landed to complete a test flight that spanned just 40 seconds.

It was more than enough accomplished the history of space.

“We can now say that human beings have flown in rotation to another planet!” an exalted MiMi Aung, the Ingenuity project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told her socially distanced team. “We’ve talked so much about our Wright brothers’ time on Mars, and here it is.

“We don’t know from history what Orville and Wilbur did after their first successful flight. I imagine the two brothers hugged. Well, I’m practically hugging you right now … We flew together to Mars and together we have the moment of our Wright brothers. “

The data confirming the historic flight arrived on Earth three hours after the flight, transmitted through NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Once launched, the data took almost 16 minutes to cross the 178 million-mile gulf between Mars and Earth.

Telemetry began appearing on computer screens at JPL immediately after 6:30 am EDT. First, the team confirmed that the data returned successfully. Then, looking closely at his screen, the JPL “pilot”, “Håvard Grip, announced the results, confirming that Ingeniousness” performed the rotation, take-off, ascent, float, descent, landing, touchdown and rotation down. “

“Altimetric data confirms that ingenuity made the first flight of a motor aircraft to another planet!” he said as engineers burst into cheers and applause.

Moments later, the initial images were displayed, including a short video filmed by Perseverance showing the small helicopter rising, gliding and descending. A sharp black-and-white static image, taken by a camera on board the ingenuity, showed the shadow of the helicopter on the surface of Mars, with the rotors clearly defined.

As each image appeared on a screen in front of the control room, the team of engineers applauded and applauded with obvious relief.

The initial short up and down flight of ingenuity might sound trivial, given the performance of cheap drones on Earth. But flying in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide with a thickness of only 1% as thick as Earth on such a distant planet is not possible direct human control and where the temperature drops to over 100 degrees below zero every night is a major technological challenge.

Based on the results of the Ingenuity mission, more sophisticated drones can eventually be sent to Mars and other parts of the solar system to transport cameras and scientific instruments to locations that are not accessible to rovers or, ultimately, to astronauts.

The ingenuity was taken to Mars, screwed on the belly The perseverance rover, which landed in Jezero crater on Feb. 18, the rover launched the helicopter to the surface and returned to observe the first of five short test flights.

Equipped with two cameras, the helicopter has no scientific instruments. It was added to the mission of Perseverance only to determine the feasibility of motor flight in the thin atmosphere of the red planet.

Eliminate the flight problem of Ingenuity

The initial test flight was originally scheduled for April 11. But two days earlier, a rotor rotation test was interrupted by the helicopter’s flight software when it failed to switch to flight mode as planned.

JPL engineers examined the telemetry and came up with two solutions. One required connecting up a few additional commands to the control software, an approach expected to work about 85% of the time.

The other option was to replace the flight software with a modified version that was tied up and stored aboard Perseverance. This would completely eliminate the problem, but it would take a few more days to implement and introduce at least one slight element of additional risk.

After a detailed analysis, the helicopter team went with the first option.

“This solution is the least disturbing for a helicopter that, until we identified the problem (the timing of the command sequence), behaved exactly as we expected,” Aung said earlier in a blog post. “It’s the simplest, because we don’t have to change its configuration.”

Over the next few days, four more test flights are planned, pushing the helicopter to slightly higher altitudes and more distant crossings to get its compact systems up and running.

After that, Perseverance will move on to its main scientific mission, leaving the helicopter behind, while the rover begins to look for signs of microbial life past in the ancient deposits of the lake on the floor of the Jezero crater.