The planet Mars is shown in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image taken May 12, 2016. NASA / Press release via Reuters
NASA hopes to score a 21st-century Wright Brothers moment Monday as it attempts to send a miniature helicopter buzzing across the surface of Mars in what would be the first powered, controlled flight of an airplane on another planet.
Breakthrough achievements in science and technology may seem modest according to conventional measurements. The Wright Brothers’ first controlled flight in the world of a motor-powered aircraft, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, traveled just 37 meters in 12 seconds.
A modest debut also awaits NASA’s Ingenuity, a solar-powered helicopter with two rotors.
If all goes to plan, the 1.8 kg whirligig will slowly rise straight up to a height of 3 meters above the surface of Mars, hang in place for 30 seconds, and then spin before heading into a gentle descent. landing on all four legs.
While the mere metrics may seem less than ambitious, the “airfield” for the interplanetary test flight is located 287 million kilometers from Earth, at the bottom of a huge basin of Mars called Jezero Crater. Success depends on Ingenuity executing the pre-programmed flight instructions using an autonomous pilot and navigation system.
“The moment our team has been waiting for is almost here,” said Ingenuity project manager MiMi Aung at a recent briefing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles.
NASA itself compares the experiment to the Wright Brothers’ feat 117 years ago, paying homage to that humble but monumental first flight by affixing a small piece of wing cloth from the original Wright flyer under Ingenuity’s solar panel.
The robotic helicopter was carried to the red planet, strapped to the belly of NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance, a mobile astrobiology lab that landed in Jezero Crater on Feb. 18 after traveling nearly seven months through space.
While Ingenuity’s flight test will begin on Monday at around 3:30 a.m. Eastern Time (Monday 7:30 a.m. GMT), data confirming the outcome is not expected to reach JPL’s mission check until around 6:15 a.m. ET on Monday.
NASA also expects to receive images and video of the flight that mission engineers hope to capture using cameras mounted on the helicopter and the Perseverance rover, which will be parked 76 meters from Ingenuity’s flight zone.
If the test passes, Ingenuity will undertake several additional, longer flights in the coming weeks, although it will need to rest for four to five days in between to recharge the batteries. The prospects for future flights rest largely on a safe landing at four points the first time.
“It doesn’t have a self-righting system, so if we have a bad landing that’s the end of the mission,” Aung said. An unexpectedly strong gust of wind is a potential danger that could spoil the flight.
NASA hopes Ingenuity – a technology demonstration separate from Perseverance’s primary mission to search for traces of ancient microorganisms – paves the way for aerial surveillance of Mars and other solar system destinations, such as Venus or Saturn’s moon Titan.
While Mars has much less gravity to overcome than Earth, its atmosphere is only 1% as dense, posing a special challenge to aerodynamic lift. To compensate for this, engineers equipped Ingenuity with rotor blades that are larger (four feet long) and turn faster than would be necessary on Earth for an aircraft of this size.
The design has been successfully tested in vacuum chambers built at JPL to simulate conditions on Mars, but it remains to be seen if Ingenuity will fly on the red planet.
The small, lightweight aircraft has already passed an early critical test by demonstrating that it can withstand the punishing cold, with nighttime temperatures dropping to 130 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius), using only solar energy. used to charge the internal components and keep them properly heated. .
The scheduled flight was delayed for a week due to a technical failure during a test rotation of the aircraft’s rotors on April 9. NASA said this problem has since been resolved.
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