Mars about to have ‘Wright brothers moment’
NASA is about to take to the air on another planet. As part of its next mission to Mars, leaving Earth this summer, the space agency will attempt to do something that has never been done before: Fly a helicopter through the rarefied atmosphere of Mars.
If it works, the small helicopter, named Ingenuity, will open a new way for future robotic explorers to get a bird’s-eye view of Mars and other worlds in the solar system.
“This is very analogous to the Wright brothers moment, but on another planet,” said Mimi Aung, the project manager of the Mars helicopter at NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory over the past six years.
Flying on Mars is not a trivial endeavor. There is not much air there to push against to generate lift. At the surface of Mars, the atmosphere is just 1/100th as dense as Earth’s. The lesser gravity — one-third of what you feel here — helps with getting airborne. But taking off from the surface of Mars is the equivalent of flying at an altitude of 100,000 feet on Earth. No terrestrial helicopter has ever flown that high, and that’s more than twice the altitude that jetliners typically fly at.
The copter will hitch a ride to the red planet with Perseverance, which is to be the fifth robotic rover NASA has sent there. The mission is scheduled to launch on July 20, one of three missions headed to Mars this year.
At a news conference last week previewing the Perseverance mission, Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, made a point to highlight Ingenuity. “I’ll tell you, the thing that has me the most excited as an NASA administrator is getting ready to watch a helicopter fly on another world,” he said.
Until 1997, all of the spacecraft sent to the surface of Mars had been stationary landers. But in 1997, the Pathfinder mission included something that was revolutionary for NASA: A wheeled robot. That rover, Sojourner, was roughly the size of a short filing cabinet. That success was followed by two golf cart-size rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, arriving on Mars in 2004 and then Curiosity, about the size of a car, in 2012.
For a robotic explorer on another planet, the ability to move around offers great advantages.
Planetary scientists are no longer stuck staring at one spot. A rover can drive across the landscape, stopping for closer looks at intriguing rocks. That freedom was key to gaining the current understanding of early Mars, that the planet, now cold and dry, was once wet and possessed at least some environments that were potentially habitable for life.
Ingenuity is in essence the aerial counterpart of Sojourner, a demonstration of a novel technology that might be used more extensively on later missions. The body of Ingenuity is about the size of a softball with four spindly legs sticking out. Two sets of blades, each about 4 feet from tip to tip, spin in opposite directions. It weighs just 4 pounds and stands about one and a half feet high.
Bob Balaram, the chief engineer for the helicopter, started working with some colleagues on the idea back in the 1990s.
“It didn’t really go anywhere,” Balaram said. “We did run some small tests, but then it sat on the shelf till about six, seven years back.”
He said Charles Elachi, then the director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, became interested and provided money for further study. “And that got us going,” Balaram said.
Doing something that had never been done before was an engineering challenge that appealed to Aung, who joined as the project manager in the middle of 2014.
“About 20 years ago, it couldn’t have been possible, really, because of the math,” said Aung who was a deputy manager of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s autonomous systems division before joining the Mars project.
But a number of advances, such as miniaturization of electronics, batteries that stored more energy and materials that could be shaped into lightweight blades, had finally made the dream of Mars flying machines into a technological possibility, Aung said.
* This article, by science writer Kenneth Chang, was first published on The New York Times. Read the full article on: www.irandailyonline.ir/news/270566.html