![]() ![]() “There’s a general correlation such that if an area is rocky for 10-centimeter rocks, it’s also rocky for one-meter rocks you can see orbit,” he says. Ten-centimeter saucer plates of the type that could upend Ingenuity were invisible.īut the geological processes that form rocky and smooth terrain aren’t random, says Ralph Lorenz, of the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Johns Hopkins University, Laurel, Maryland, which is designing the Dragonfly mission, and author of a book about Ingenuity and Dragonfly. From space, they could see the difference between rocky terrain and smoother terrain, but there was a limit to the size of the rocks they could see. To fix this, the engineers got innovative. ![]() Read more: Explainer: The chemistry of Titan. It took two flights (and recharge cycles) to go 350 meters-an average of 175 meters per flight, rather than the 700 meters it was capable of. Then it could hop to the new safe haven, land, recharge, and start the process over. That meant it could only scout 350 meters ahead before returning for the data to be processed. Ingenuity has a flight range of about 700 meters. While it was recharging its batteries, scientists would examine the images and pick the next safe landing zone. Initially, the idea was to leave from a safe base, fly out about half as far as it could go on a single hop-photographing what it saw en route-then return to its prior safe haven. First, they learned how to scout ahead, looking for safe landing spots. Ingenuity is a gossamer thing of spindly legs and thin high-speed rotors that looks more like a toy than a $US 80 million research project.īut it worked and then scientists started finding ways to expand its capabilities. Not only was it so difficult to fly under Martian conditions that in lab tests no human pilot had been able to control the prototype (requiring the development of a very fast-acting robotic control system), but all it would take would be an awkward landing on a 10-centimeter rock to topple it on its side where it would likely spend the rest of eternity in the Martian dust. Ingenuity is a gossamer thing of spindly legs and thin high-speed rotors that looks more like a toy than a $US 80 million research project. The first flight, he admits, was a nailbiter. “We originally sent Ingenuity to Mars as a technology demonstration,” Grip said at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Chicago, Illinois, “but Ingenuity far exceeded those original objectives.” NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter can be seen on Mars as viewed by the Perseverance rover’s rear Hazard Camera on April 4, 2021, the 44th Martian day, or sol of the mission. The new Mars helicopters are a direct result of Ingenuity’s success. ![]() Not only are there plans to send two more Ingenuity-class helicopters to Mars to help with the Mars Sample Return mission, scheduled for launch in 2027, but NASA is well under way in designing a helicopter called Dragonfly, scheduled to be launched for Saturn’s moon Titan the same year. “ is the first aircraft in history to operate from the surface of another planet, Håvard Gripīut it’s unlikely to be the last. “ is the first aircraft in history to operate from the surface of another planet,” says its chief pilot, Håvard Grip, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. Everest, but of being a useful scout for NASA’s Perseverance rover, for which it has now flown more than 40 missions. Since then, the plucky helicopter (which masses a mere 1.8 kilograms) has proven itself not only capable of flying in conditions equivalent to those four times higher than the summit of Mt. As little as two years ago, nobody outside of a very small group of scientists and engineers had ever heard of “space helicopters.” Then, on 19 April 2021, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter lifted off from the surface of Mars, flew around, and landed-proving that it was, amazingly, possible to fly in the thin Martian air. ![]()
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