HEROIC HELICOPTER

When it was included on NASA’S Perseverance rover as an additional 1.8kg of payload, the mission’s tiny Ingenuity helicopter was supposed to be a one-month affair, intended simply to test whether it was possible to fly in the thin air of Mars. But the intrepid helicopter wasn’t just a crowd-pleaser for space buffs; it worked wildly beyond expectations. As of midsummer 2022, it had completed 29 flights – 24 more than planned – and proven itself an invaluable companion for the Perseverance rover.

Initially, its biggest limitation had been the combination of its threeminute battery life and the need to find safe landing sites before its battery died. The safest thing to do was to scout no more than 60 or 70 seconds ahead, then return to its prior base to recharge its batteries, while scientists back on Earth looked to see if, in the process, it had found a safe place to land on its next foray. But that’s cumbersome, time consuming, and with all of those back-and-forths reduces the helicopter’s maximum speed across the terrain by a factor of four.

“We quickly figured out that if we had to scout out every site before we landed, we would dramatically restrict operations,” Matt Golombek, a planetary geologist at NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at the 2022 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. In fact, there were concerns that the helicopter would eventually get outrun by the rover and have to be abandoned.

What was needed was to find a way to find safe landing zones from space, so the helicopter could go directly from one to another. And luckily, that was Golombek’s specialty – something he’d been doing ever since the Mars Pathfinder landing in 1997.

“My day job is selecting landing sites on Mars,” he says. “I’ve spent most of my career looking for rocks.” With 29 helicopter safe landings (and counting), it looks like he knows what he’s doing.