The day has finally arrived! Ingeniousness, the small helicopter that landed on Mars with NASA’s Perseverance rover, has now made history by making the first motor flight of an aircraft to another planet.
This story has been updated.
Ingeniousness, the Mars helicopter, is an innovative technological demonstration to test the flight of the controlled and powered rotor on Mars. This was once thought impossible, due to the extremely thin atmosphere of Mars. The mission team has now shown that this is indeed possible, and this could lead to new types of exploration on Mars.
Perseverance’s first selfie rover, on April 6, 2021, included ingenuity in the image (presented and enlarged in the insert). Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Scott Sutherland
After several delays, the Mars helicopter made its first test flight at 3:30 a.m. ET on Monday, April 19th.
During this test, Ingenuity rotated its double rotors up to 2,500 revolutions per minute. This generated enough lift for the helicopter to rise into the air at a height of 3 meters above the ground. The ingenuity then hovered, pivoting toward perseverance in the process and leaning back slightly to the ground.
This still image in the Mastcam-Z video shows ingenuity hovering over the surface. Visible on the ground in the shadow of the helicopter. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
“We can now say that human beings have flown in rotation on another planet!” said Mimi Aung, project manager of Mars’ helicopter ingenuity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The data for this flight was transmitted to Earth by Perseverance and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, arriving shortly after 6:30 ET. The data confirming the successful test consisted of a simple graph showing the altitude of the helicopter over time. Images taken by the cameras facing down from the helicopter were also transmitted back to Earth.
The best view of this flight, however, was provided by the Perseverance rover, through the high-resolution Mastcam-Z camera. Watch the flight below:
DUSTY MARS
Mars is a very dusty planet. This was a significant concern for the ingenious flight crew, due to the potential of the test to throw a substantial amount of dust, which can cause problems with the flight or hide their vision on it out of perseverance.
During the flight, Perseverance captured high-resolution images, and NASA scientists applied special processing to those images to determine how much dust the Ingeniousness was displaced during the flight. A side-by-side video is shown below, showing both the highly processed view used to detect dust and an enhanced view of the original images with that added dust movement.
According to NASA: “The left view uses motion filtering to show where dust was detected during takeoff and landing, and the right view is improved with motion filtering. Scientists use this image processing to detect dust devils as they pass by rovers on Mars. The “cutout” of the helicopter is visible in each adjacent format; this is an artifact related to digital processing. “
DELAYS
The Ingenuity test flight was originally scheduled for Sunday, April 11th. However, in the days leading up to that date, the team noticed a problem while testing their systems.
The Mars helicopter, imagined by one of the Navcams’ navigation cameras on April 5, 2021. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Scott Sutherland
As the mission team reported in a status update: “During a high-speed rotor rotation test on Friday, the test control sequence ended early due to the expiration of the ‘watchdog’ timer. This occurred while trying to switch the flight computer from “Pre-flight” to “Flight mode. The helicopter is safe and healthy and has communicated its entire set of telemetry to Earth. “
Based on this, the first flight was delayed until at least April 14.
In another April 12 update, they said they had found a way to program a solution to the problem. This required the validation and transmission of the new program to ingenuity, and then the small drone will be restarted for the new programming to take effect. As this process was expected to take some time to complete, they delayed the date of the first test flight sometime during the week of April 19th.
THE FIRST ALIEN PLANE
Several missions so far can be said to have “flown” through the atmosphere of Mars. When rovers and landers first enter the atmosphere from space, they technically fly during the air braking phase, although it is more like a controlled fall. In the case of Curiosity, its skycrane stage performed a motorized flight, as it dropped the rover to the surface and then drove it away to crash at a safe distance. The perseverance skycrane did the same, but took a step further and performed a real “controlled” flight. As it descended to the surface, the rover made images of the ground below, and the skycranane reacted to what was captured, redirecting its flight path to a safe place.
However, none of them did what their ingenuity did now.
In this computer simulation, ingenuity is displayed flying a short distance from the Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
Ingeniousness made the first powered, controlled AIRCRAFT flight to another planet. It was the first robot to land on Mars, take off again from the surface and then land safely again.
So why test something like that? With motorized rotor flight, now a proven concept for Mars, it opens up a new facet of surface missions that we haven’t explored yet.
Perhaps in the future, each new rover or lander mission will include a helicopter attendant who can quickly explore and research around where his main one is. Or we will probably fill the Pathfinder-style landers with swarms of rotorcraft, which will leave the “base camp” to quickly explore a large area in a short time. Or, the “sample return” mission that is planned to pursue perseverance could include helicopters designed to pick up those sampling tubes and return them to the lander for return to Earth.
Also, when human missions finally arrive to explore Mars, each could bring more of these helicopters with them. This would allow them to discover in detail the locations around the landing site, in order to maximize the scientific potential of their visit.
NOT THE IDEAL ENVIRONMENT
Mars does not have the best environment for aircraft flight. It is cold and dusty, and this combination can delay an impressive static charge. These conditions can test the electronic hardware of any robot, especially that of a small helicopter drone.
However, the biggest challenge that ingenuity faced was the planet’s atmosphere. The atmosphere on Mars has about one percent of the surface pressure of the Earth’s atmosphere.
This image taken by the Viking 1 orbiter in June 1976 provides a glimpse into the thin, dusty atmosphere of Mars in space. Credit: NASA / Viking 1.
This was a challenge for all the missions that landed on the planet. Only there is enough air for the heat shields and parachutes to work properly, so each mission needs something extra beyond these measures. For Pathfinder & Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, the airbags deployed after their parachutes did everything they could, which allowed the robots to jump to the surface and finally stop. The more massive rovers of curiosity and perseverance required the impressive maneuvers “cranes with motor sky” to reach intact and safe.
For ingenuity, the challenge was to generate enough lift in the extremely thin atmosphere to actually lift off the ground and fly. To do this, it needed specially designed rotors that rotated up to 2,500 rpm – three times faster than rotors on Earth should rotate.
Now, the mission team has not gone blind, of course. They tested their ingenuity in a special room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, known as the Space Simulator. In this huge sealed room, they recreated the cold, low-pressure weather conditions that ingenuity would encounter on Mars, and then adapted the small helicopter to fly in these conditions.
The question of whether it will actually work in the real world has now been answered! Watch more updates in the coming days.