The day has finally arrived! Ingenuity, the small helicopter that went to Mars with NASA’s Perseverance rover, has now made history by making the first powered flight of an airplane on another planet.
This story has been updated.
Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter, is a groundbreaking technology demonstration to test powered, controlled rotor flights on Mars. This is something once thought impossible due to Mars’ extremely thin atmosphere. The mission team has now proven that this is indeed possible, and could lead to new types of exploration on Mars.
Perseverance’s first rover selfie, on April 6, 2021, featured Ingenuity in the photo (also shown enlarged in the inset). Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Scott Sutherland
After a few delays, the Mars helicopter conducted its first test flight at 3:30 a.m. ET on Monday, April 19.
During this test, Ingenuity spun its twin rotors at up to 2,500 revolutions per minute. This generated enough lift to lift the helicopter into the air to a height of 3 meters above the ground. Ingenuity then floated, turned to Perseverance in the process, and gently lowered itself back to the ground.
This still image from the Mastcam-Z video shows Ingenuity floating above the surface. The shadow of the helicopter is visible on the ground below. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
“We can now say that people flew to another planet in a helicopter!” said Mimi Aung, project manager of the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The data from this flight was relayed to Earth via Perseverance and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which arrived shortly after 6:30 a.m. ET. The data to confirm the successful test consisted of a simple graph showing the height of the helicopter over time. Images taken by the downward-facing cameras on the helicopter were also returned to Earth.
However, the best view of this flight was provided by the Perseverance rover, through its high-resolution Mastcam-Z camera. Watch the flight below:
DUSTY MARS
Mars is a very dusty planet. This was a major concern for the Ingenuity flight team as the test could potentially stir up a significant amount of dust, potentially creating issues with the flight or obstructing their view of it for persistence.
In flight, Perseverance captured high-resolution images, and NASA scientists applied special processing to those images to determine how much dust Ingenuity moved in flight. A side-by-side video is shown below, showing both the highly edited rendering used to detect the dust and an enhanced image of the original images with that dust motion added.
According to NASA: “The vision on the left uses motion filtering to show where dust was detected during takeoff and landing, and the vision on the right is enhanced with the motion filtering. Scientists use this image processing to detect dust devils as they pass Mars rovers.” “Cutout” of the helicopter is visible in any side-by-side format, which is an artifact related to the digital processing. “
DELAYS
Originally, Ingenuity’s test flight was scheduled for Sunday, April 11. However, in the days leading up to that date, the team identified a problem testing its systems.
The Mars helicopter, photographed by one of Perseverance’s navigation cameras (Navcams) on April 5, 2021. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Scott Sutherland
As the mission team reported in a status update: “During a quick rotation test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended prematurely due to the expiration of a watchdog timer. Flight mode. The helicopter is safe and sound and communicated its full telemetry set to Earth.”
On this basis, the first flight was delayed until at least April 14.
In another update on April 12, they said they found a way to program a fix for the problem that arose. This required the new program to be validated and sent to Ingenuity, and then the small drone would reboot for the new programming to take effect. Since this process was expected to take some time, they postponed the date of the first test flight sometime in the week of April 19.
FIRST EXTRATERRESTRIAL AIRCRAFT
Several missions to date 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 aerobraking phase, although it is more like controlled falling. In Curiosity’s case, the skycrane stage performed a powered flight while laying the rover on the surface, then pushing it away to crash at a safe distance. The Perseverance overhead crane did the same, but went a step further and performed an actual ‘controlled’ flight. As the rover descended to the surface, the rover took pictures of the ground below, and the skycrane responded to what was captured and re-directed its flight path to place the rover in a safe place.
Yet none of them have done what Ingenuity has now achieved.
In this computer simulation, Ingenuity is shown a short distance from the Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
Ingenuity carried out the first powered, controlled plane flee to another planet. It was the first robot to land on Mars, take off from the surface and then land safely again.
So why would you even test such a thing? With powered helicopter flights now a proven concept for Mars, this opens up a new facet for surface emissions that we have not yet explored.
Perhaps in the future, every new rover or lander mission will include a helicopter companion that can quickly scout and explore where the primary location is. Or maybe we fill Pathfinder-style landers with swarms of helicopters that fan out from ‘base camp’ to quickly explore a large area in a short amount of time. Or the ‘sample return’ mission planned to follow persistence could include helicopters designed to retrieve those sample tubes and return them to the lander for return to Earth.
When human missions finally arrive to explore Mars, they can all carry several of these helicopters. This would allow them to explore locations around the landing site in detail to maximize the scientific potential of their visit.
NOT THE IDEAL ENVIRONMENT
Mars doesn’t have the best environment for airplane flight. It’s cold and dusty, and this combination can create an impressive static charge. These conditions can test any robot’s electronic hardware, especially that of a small helicopter drone.
However, the biggest challenge Ingenuity faced was the planet’s atmosphere. The atmosphere of 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, offers a glimpse of Mars’ thin, dusty atmosphere from space. Credit: NASA / Viking 1.
This has been a challenge for all missions that have landed on the planet. There is barely enough air there for heat shields and parachutes to function properly, so each mission needed a little something extra in addition to those measures. For Pathfinder & Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, airbags deployed after their parachutes did what they could, allowing the robots to bounce across the surface and eventually come to a stop. The more massive Curiosity and Perseverance rovers required the impressive powered sky crane maneuvers to land intact and safe.
For Ingenuity, the challenge was to generate enough lift in the extremely thin atmosphere to actually take off and fly. This required specially designed rotors that spun up to 2500 rpm – more than three times faster than rotors on Earth need to turn.
Now, of course, the mission team did not go into this blindly. They tested Ingenuity in a special room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory known as the Space Simulator. In this immense enclosed chamber, they recreated the cold, low-pressure atmospheric conditions that Ingenuity will encounter on Mars and then modified the small helicopter to fly in those conditions.
The question of whether it will actually work in the real environment has now been answered! Check for more updates in the coming days.