Perseverance, NASA’s new Mars Rover will carry along with it a new addition when it launches in 2020 – the Ingenuity Mars helicopter. This is an unprecedented initiative and has been dubbed as an innovative experiment. Although it weighs only 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms), NASA has high hopes on it.
“The Wright Brothers showed that powered flight in the Earth’s atmosphere was possible using an experimental aircraft. With Ingenuity, we’re trying out the same for Mars”, said Harvard Grip, the chief pilot for Ingenuity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California in Southern California.
Here’s all you need to know about it:
1.The conception of its name
This name was originally submitted by a high school student for the Mars rover. After NASA planned the addition of this helicopter to their mission, they felt that Ingenuity was the perfect name for this, attributing to the amount of creative thinking that had gone into the helicopter.
2. Ingenuity is a tech demo
It is a technology demonstration. This goes to say that it is a project designed to test the capability of any new technology for the first time. Similar experiments have been done in the past with the Sojourner, the Mars Pathfinder, and Mars Cube ONE (MarCO) CubeSats, that were launched in 2018. Ingenuity will also be the first-ever aircraft to attempt to controlled flight in an atmosphere other than the Earth.
3. Specifications
It has four specially made carbon fibre blades which have been arranged into two routers that spin in opposite directions. This makes it several times faster than any passenger helicopter on earth. It also has innovative solar cells, batteries, and other components and a separate experiment from the Perseverance Rover.
In an atmosphere like Mars’, where the thickness is 99% lesser than that of the Earth, the helicopter in itself has to be very light for it to spin faster than that on earth so as to remain suspended. Engineers at NASA had already demonstrated in 2019 that it was possible to build a lightweight and craft that was able to generate enough thrust to lift off in Mars’ thin atmosphere. Considering the bone-chilling cold temperature of -130⁰ at the Jezero crater where it will be landing, the rotor blades have to be much larger than an average helicopter’s.
It has special simulators added to it in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The catch here is that the flight controllers will not be able to control it with the conventional joystick and so the comments will have to be sent well in advance.
Ingenuity will also have the autonomy to make its own decisions about how to keep warm and fly to a waypoint.
4. Milestones set for Ingenuity’s journey
The team that designed Ingenuity has a long list of milestones to accomplish before the helicopter can take off and land in 2021 spring. There have been celebrations planned for each milestone. The milestones are as follows:
- Surviving the launch from Cape Canaveral, the cruise to mass, and landing on it.
- Safely deploying from perseverance to the surface of Mars
- Keeping warm and adjusting its residual temperature autonomously throughout its presence on the red planet and surviving its insanely cold temperatures
- Charging itself on its own with the solar panel
Only after achieving all these milestones will Ingenuity be sanctioned for its first flight. Following this, the helicopter team is scheduled to attempt for more flights within a 31-Earth-Day window which accounts for a 30-day-Mars period.
5. Impact of Ingenuity’s potential success
The success of ingenuity could mean a huge expansion for Mars exploration in an ambitious aerial dimension. It is intended as a demonstration of the technology needed for flying in an atmosphere as thin as Mars’. It could also offer a viewpoint that has not been provided so far by other orbiters and could provide HD images and potential for access by humans into this uncharted territory and the terrains that are difficult for rovers to reach currently.
“The Ingenuity team has done everything to test the helicopter on Earth, and we are looking forward to flying our experiment in the real environment on Mars”, said Mimi Aung, Ingenuity’s Project Manager at JPL. She added that they will be learning all along the way and is an ultimate reward that they have been given the ability to add another dimension to the way that other planets have been explored and will be explored in the future.
Source: ANI