LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – NASA hopes to score a 21st century Wright brothers moment on Monday as it tries to send a miniature helicopter buzzing over the surface of Mars into what would be the first motorized flight of one aircraft to another the planet.
Reference achievements in science and technology may seem humble by conventional measurements. The first Wright brothers-controlled flight in a motorized plane near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, traveled only 120 feet in 12 seconds.
A modest debut is also reserved for the ingenuity of NASA’s dual-powered solar-powered helicopter.
If all goes smoothly, the 4-pound vortex will slowly rise straight to an altitude of 10 feet above the Martian surface, move into position for 30 seconds, then rotate before descending to a light landing on all the four legs.
While the simple metric may seem less than ambitious, the “aerodrome” for interplanetary test flight is 173 million miles from Earth, on the floor of a vast Martian basin called the Jezero Crater. Success depends on the ingenuity of executing pre-programmed flight instructions using an autonomous pilot and a navigation system.
“The moment our team has been waiting for is almost here,” Ingenuity project manager MiMi Aung said in a recent briefing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles.
NASA itself compares the experiment to the feat of the Wright brothers 117 years ago, paying homage to the first modest but monumental flight after fixing a small piece of wing fabric from the original Wright steering wheel under the Ingenuity solar panel.
The rotorcraft robot was transported to the red planet bound to the belly of NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover, a mobile astrobiology laboratory that touched down on Jezero crater on February 18 after a nearly seven-month journey through space.
Although the flight test of ingenuity is scheduled to start around 01:30, the standard time of the mountain, it is not expected that the data confirming its result will reach the control of the JPL mission until around 4:15 AM MST Monday.
NASA also expects to receive images and videos of the flight that mission engineers hope to capture using helicopter-mounted cameras and the Perseverance rover, which will be parked 250 meters away from the Ingenuity flight area.
If the test succeeds, Ingenuity will perform a few more, longer flights in the coming weeks, although it will have to rest for four to five days between each to recharge its batteries. Prospects for future flights are largely based on a safe, four-point touchdown for the first time.
“It doesn’t have a self-correction system, so if we have a bad landing, this will be the end of the mission,” Aung said. An unexpectedly strong gust of wind is a potential danger that could damage the flight.
NASA hopes that Ingeniousness, a technological demonstration separate from Perseverance’s main mission to search for traces of ancient microorganisms, paves the way for aerial surveillance of Mars and other destinations in the solar system, such as Venus or Saturn’s moon Titan.
While Mars has much less gravity to overcome than Earth, its atmosphere is only 1% denser, presenting a special challenge for aerodynamic lift. To compensate, the engineers have ingeniously equipped rotor blades that are larger (4 feet-long) and rotate faster than would be needed on Earth for an aircraft of its size.
The design has been successfully tested in vacuum chambers built at JPL to simulate Martian conditions, but it remains to be seen whether ingenuity will fly to the red planet.
The small light aircraft has already passed an essential early test, proving that it can withstand the punishment of the cold, with night temperatures dropping to 130 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, using only solar energy to recharge and keep internal components properly heated.
The planned flight was delayed by a week due to a technical problem during a test rotation of the aircraft’s rotors on April 9. NASA said the issue has been resolved since then.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Daniel Wallis)
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