NASA’S Mars helicopter takes flight, 1st for another planet
Mini 1.8-kg copter named Ingenuity carried a bit of wing fabric from 1903 Wright Flyer, which made similar history at Kity Hawk, North Carolina
NASA’S experimental Mars helicopter rose from the dusty red surface into the thin air on Monday, achieving the first powered, controlled flight on another planet.
The triumph was hailed as a Wright Brothers moment. The mini 1.8-kilogramme copter named Ingenuity, in fact, carried a bit of wing fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer, which made similar history at Kity Hawk, North Carolina.
“We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcrat on another planet,” project manager Mimi Aung announced to her team.
Flight controllers in California confirmed Ingenuity’s brief hop ater receiving data via the Perseverance rover, which stood watch more than 65 metres away.
Ingenuity hitched a ride to Mars on Perseverance, clinging to the rover’s belly upon their arrival in an ancient river delta in February.
The $85 million helicopter demo was considered high risk, yet high reward.
“Each world gets only one first flight,” project manager Mimi Aung noted earlier this month. Speaking on a NASA webcast early on Monday, she called it the “ultimate dream.”
Aung and her team had to wait more than three excruciating hours before learning whether the pre-programmed flight had succeeded 287 million kilometers away.
Adding to their anxiety: A sotware error prevented the helicopter from liting off a week earlier and had engineers scrambling to come up with a fix.
Applause, cheers and laughter erupted in the operations centre when success was finally declared. There was even more when the first black and white photo appeared on the screens, showing Ingenuity’s shadow as it hovered above the surface of Mars. Next came the stunning colour images of the helicopter descending back to the surface, taken by Perseverance, resulting in even more applause.
Details were initially sparse, but NASA had been aiming for a 40-second flight. The helicopter was supposed to rise 3 meters, hover for up to 30 seconds, then pivot toward the rover and land close to where it took off.
To accomplish all that, the helicopter’s twin, counter-rotating rotor blades needed to spin at 2,500 revolutions per minute - five times faster than on Earth.
With an atmosphere just 1 per cent the thickness of Earth’s, engineers had to build a helicopter light enough - with blades spinning fast enough - to generate this otherworldy lit. At the same time, it had to be sturdy enough to withstand the Martian wind and extreme cold.
More than six years in the making, Ingenuity is a barebones 0.5 meters tall, a spindly fourlegged chopper. Its fuselage, containing all the bateries, heaters and sensors, is the size of a tissue box.
The carbon-fiber, foam-filled rotors are the biggest pieces: Each pair stretches 1.2 meters tip to tip.
The helicopter is topped with a solar panel for recharging the bateries, crucial for its survival during the minus-90 degree-celsius Martian nights. NASA chose a flat, relatively rock-free patch for Ingenuity’s airfield, measuring 33 feet by 10 meters.