NASA Reveals Flight Zone for Historic Helicopter Flight on Mars

NASA has locked a location for the first demo flight of its mini-helicopter Ingenuity on Mars, engineers announced on Tuesday. The four-pound rotorcraft is gearing up to attempt the first powered flight on another planet, demonstrating a new capability that could unlock access to hard-to-reach areas of other celestial bodies in the future.

Ingenuity arrived on Mars in February, firmly affixed to the rover’s belly, which survived a seven-month trek into deep space and a seven-minute intensive landing sequence through Mars’ atmosphere. Within hours of the Perseverance landing, engineers began analyzing the orbital imagery to find a prime flight zone to spare Ingenuity for its first flight – “an area where it is safe to land a helicopter” , And is also safe for the helicopter to land. After re-flight, “said the chief pilot of the craft, Howard Grip.

The landing site, he said, needed to be flat and free of any large rocks that could threaten Ingenuity’s flight demo. But it also requires having a “texture” – different features on the ground that can make the helicopter’s AI-powered navigation camera a place to track its whereabouts during flight. Soon after landing, “we realized that we could have a really great airfield in front of our noses,” Gripe told reporters at a press briefing on Tuesday.

There is persistence during a day’s drive to the flight zone just 196 feet from the landing site. When it arrives, the craft will be grounded. The persistence would then last for about 25 hours, moving to a location 330 feet away, which NASA saw as a tribute to Van Zyl. Jakob One Xile, A senior scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who died last year.

Leaving Simplicity in its flight zone is “a very determined and meticulous process”, said Farah Alibay, who leads the integration of Ingenuity with persistence. He said that the inversibility must flip from its current horizontal position to the vertical position on the rover before it touches the ground. “The most stressful day, at least for me, is going to be the last day when we finally disassemble the helicopter and leave Ingenuity on the ground.”

Image: NASA / JPL

Lockheed Martin designed the Mars helicopter delivery system that would help the Ingenuity’s short landing legs to land on the ground. Keeping that distribution system light while safe was also a major challenge for Lockheed, which has decades of experience designing space systems. “We used to throw all that legacy and knowledge aside and really start with a new electrical connection design,” explained Jeremy Mori, Lockheed’s top engineer for deployment systems The Reporter Door in an interview.

Once on the ground, NASA engineers expect Ingenuity to conduct its first flight test before April 8, depending on the weather in Mars. The helicopter’s flight zone is shaped like a mini running track, with a box-shaped takeoff and a return zone on one side of the zone. “The first flight is special – it’s the most important flight we plan to do so far,” Gripe said, adding that a successful first flight would mean “full mission success”.

For that first flight, Ingenuity would climb about 10 feet (3 m), hover in place for about 30 seconds, turn into a midair, then land for landing. It would be fully autonomous, working on orders sent by engineers on Earth on the first day. A 0.5-megapixel navigation camera on the underside of Ingenuity will shatter on the ground 30 photos per second to inform its movement.

Ingenuity has a more powerful camera with 13 megapixels, facing the horizon. Will snap pictures in midair, while cameras mounted on the fixture will aim to capture the helicopter in flight. All those pictures will eventually be sent back to Earth.

Image: NASA / JPL

Four more flight tests are planned in a one-month window after Ingenuity’s first 10-foot takeoff. What the helicopter does during those flight tests will largely depend on earlier results. “It could, in theory, be higher than currently designed,” Gripe said. “There may be cases where, if everything goes well during our nominal flights, we can extend things a little beyond the nominal flight.”

After that, Ingenuity’s trial campaign will likely end. This is a demo mission, and the persistence is to focus on other objectives, such as bringing Martian soil samples back to Earth for future Mars missions.

If successful, Ingenuity will mark the first powered flight in another world. A mission by the Soviet Union to Venus under its Vega program in the 1980s claimed the title for the first off-world flight, with two balloon aerobots flying (not powered) into Venus’ clouds. Off-world helicopters such as Ingenuity, if proven viable, can be used in future missions to track places where wheeled rovers cannot reach, like caves, tunnels, or mountains.

Even before Ingenuity’s first flight, engineers are already building it. Lockheed engineer Mori said a small four-pound helicopter made the journey from Earth to Mars easier. “You have to avoid launching on a rocket while carrying carbon fiber wings. It has never been done before, ”he said of such a mission.