NASA’S tiny helicopter makes the first flight of its kind on red planet
A tiny helicopter and a very short flight on Monday launched a significant new era of Mars exploration.
NASA’S 4-pound Ingenuity helicopter lifted off the Martian soil at 2:34 a.m. CDT, climbing 10 feet above the planet’s surface and then lowering itself for a gentle landing. The entire flight lasted 39.1 seconds.
It was the first powered, controlled flight on another planet, and NASA is already working on conceptual designs for larger Mars helicopters that weigh between 55 and 66 pounds and could carry scientific instruments.
“This really is a Wright brothers moment,” acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk said during a news conference. “It’s the start of a whole new kind of planetary exploration, and we’ll build on Ingenuity’s success.”
Ingenuity, strapped to the belly of NASA’S Perseverance rover, reached Mars on Feb. 18. Perseverance’s main mission is to explore the Jezero Crater for signs of ancient life. But first, it’s dedicating one month to Ingenuity’s test flights.
On Monday, the helicopter reached 10 feet and then hovered for about 5 seconds. It turned about 96 degrees, hovered for another 20 seconds and then landed at the same place it took off.
“From everything we’ve seen so far, it was a flawless flight,” Håvard Grip, Ingenuity’s chief pilot, said during the news conference. “It was a gentle takeoff. At altitude it gets pushed around a little bit by the winds, but it really just maintains station very well. And it stuck the landing.”
This landing site has been named Wright Brothers Field in honor of Earth’s first powered, controlled flight on Dec. 17, 1903. And the helicopter carries a small piece of this aviation history. Underneath its solar panel is a stampsized piece of fabric that was part of the wing covering on the Wright brothers aircraft that took the first powered flight.
However, flying on Mars is very different than flying on Earth. A major challenge is the planet’s thin atmosphere.
To fly, a helicopter must generate lift. It does this on Earth by pushing air with its blades, but the atmosphere on Mars is 1 percent the density of Earth’s atmosphere. There are fewer molecules for the blades to push.
That means the helicopter must be light (on Mars, Ingenuity weighs just 1.5 pounds) and have blades that are much larger and faster than what’s required for an Ingenuity-sized helicopter on Earth. The blades spin about 40 times a second.
Ingenuity must also fly autonomously due to the communications lag between Earth and Mars.
To help navigate itself, Ingenuity takes images of the ground (about 30 images a second) to track features on the planet’s surface and see how it’s moving. This is combined with information from other sensors to make tiny adjustments to its controls (doing this 500 times a second) to keep the helicopter on the trajectory NASA provides prior to flight.
On Monday, the images taken for navigation showed Ingenuity’s shadow beneath it. The Perseverance rover, parked 211 feet away, also caught images of the helicopter’s first flight.
Ingenuity could take four more flights, and the next one could occur on Thursday. NASA will have a firmer date after it receives additional helicopter data on Tuesday.
The team really wants to be bold on the helicopter’s final flights. Project manager Mimi Aung said she expects the vehicle “will meet its limit” in a way that helps the team get more data. In other words, it’s not planned for Ingenuity to survive and/or fly beyond the test window.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’S Associate Administrator for Science, said he supports that plan.
“We really want to be sure that, when everything is said and done, we know the full scope of what’s possible with that type of flying machine,” Zurbuchen said.