NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter makes maiden flight on Mars in a “Wright Brothers moment”

After overcoming one previous software problemNASA’s $ 80 million Ingenuity helicopter spun its carbon composite rotors and lifted off the dusty surface of Mars early Monday to become the first plane to fly to another planet, a “Wright Brothers moment” that could pave the way for future interplanetary aircraft.

The scale only tilted 4 pounds – 1.5 pounds in the lower gravity of Mars – Ingenuity’s counter-spinning 4-foot long rotors, spinning at over 2500 rpm, were instructed to change their pitch and plunge deeper into the rarefied atmosphere. ‘bite’ for a launch from the floor of Crater lake around 3:30 am EDT.

With the Perseverance Watching from a safe distance, Ingenuity climbed straight up 3 meters, soared, turned and landed to complete a test flight of just 40 seconds or so.

That was more than enough to make space history.

“We can now say that people flew to another planet in a helicopter!” a delighted MiMi Aung, the Ingenuity project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told her socially aloof team. “We’ve talked for so long about our Wright brothers’ moment on Mars, and here it is.

“We don’t know from history what Orville and Wilbur did after their first successful flight. I imagine the two brothers hugged each other. Well, now I hug you virtually. … We flew to Mars together, and we have together. our Wright brothers moment. “

Data confirming that the historic flight reached Earth three hours after the flight, passed through NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Once en route, the data took nearly 16 minutes to cross the 178 million mile gap between Mars and Earth.

The telemetry started appearing on computer screens at JPL just after 6:30 am EDT. First, the team confirmed that the data had returned successfully. Then, looking intently at his display, JPL’s “pilot”, Håvard Grip, announced the results, confirming Ingenuity “performed spin-up, take-off, climb, float, descent, landing, touchdown and spin-down.”

“Altimeter data confirms Ingenuity made the maiden flight of a powered aircraft on another planet!” he said as engineers burst into cheers and applause.

Moments later, the first images were shown, including a short video made by Perseverance in which the small helicopter takes off, floats and descends. A sharp black and white still image, taken by a camera on board Ingenuity, showed the helicopter’s shadow on the surface of Mars, with sharp rotors.

As every image appeared on a screen at the front of the control room, the engineering team cheered and applauded with obvious relief.

Ingenuity’s brief up-and-down maiden flight may sound trivial given the performance of cheap drones on Earth. But flying in an atmosphere that is mainly carbon dioxide, only 1% as thick as the Earth on a planet so far away, does not allow direct human control and where the temperature drops to more than 100 degrees below zero every night is a major technological challenge. challenge.

Based on the results of Ingenuity’s mission, more advanced drones could eventually be sent to Mars and elsewhere in the solar system to deliver cameras and scientific instruments to locations inaccessible to rovers or, ultimately, astronauts.

Ingenuity was carried to Mars, screwed to the belly of the Perseverance robber who landed in Jezero Crater on February 18. The rover later dropped the helicopter to the surface and reversed to observe the first of five short test flights.

Equipped with two cameras, the helicopter has no scientific instruments. It was only added to Perseverance’s mission to determine the feasibility of powered flight in the red planet’s thin atmosphere.

Solve Ingenuity’s flight problem

The first test flight was originally scheduled for April 11. But two days earlier, a rotor spin-up test was aborted by the helicopter’s flight software when it failed to switch to flight mode as planned.

Engineers at JPL reviewed telemetry and came up with two solutions. One required the uplink of a few additional commands to the control software, an approach that was expected to work about 85% of the time.

The other option was to replace the flight software with a modified version that has been uplinked and stored on board Perseverance. That would eliminate the problem completely, but it would take a few more days to implement and introduce at least a small element of additional risk.

After a detailed analysis, the helicopter team went for the first option.

“This solution is the least disruptive for a helicopter that, until we discovered the (command sequence timing) issue, was behaving as we expected,” Aung said earlier in a blog post. “It’s the most straightforward, as we don’t have to change the configuration.”

Up to four more test flights are planned in the coming days, pushing the helicopter to slightly higher altitudes and more far-reaching traverses to put the compact systems to the test.

After that, Perseverance will continue on to its primary science mission, leaving the helicopter behind while the rover looks for signs of past microbial life in ancient deposits at the bottom of the Jezero Crater.