First helicopter flight attempt on Mars, Nasa announces

AFP

Still attached to the Perseverance rover that landed on Mars last month, the Ingenuity helicopter will attempt its first flight on the Red Planet in early April.

Nasa will attempt in early April the first flight of a motorized vehicle on another planet, trying to launch the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, announced Tuesday the U.S. space agency.

For now, the ultralight helicopter, which actually looks more like a large drone, is still folded and strapped under the Perseverance rover, which landed on the Red Planet last month. "Our best estimate right now is April 8" for the first flight, Bob Balaram, Ingenuity's chief engineer, said at a news conference. The exact day could still change, however, he said.

Our Ingenuity #MarsHelicopter has to meet a series of milestones before taking its first flight on the Red Planet. Here's how it's preparing for the test, targeted for April 8: https://t.co/BI9lXOzueU pic.twitter.com/4gk94xnbjR

NASA (@NASA) March 23, 2021

If the experiment is successful, it will be a real feat, because Martian air has a density equivalent to only 1% of that of the Earth's atmosphere. It will be the equivalent on Mars of the first flight of a motorized vehicle on Earth, in 1903. Nasa revealed that a small piece of fabric from the Wright brothers' aircraft that took off more than a century ago in North Carolina, USA, had been placed on Ingenuity as a tribute, and was therefore currently on Mars.

It is planned that this first flight will be very simple: after taking off vertically, the helicopter will rise to an altitude of 3 meters, will maintain a hover for 30 seconds, then will rotate on itself before resting on the ground. It will receive its instructions of the Earth a few hours before, but will analyze itself its position compared to the ground during the flight, by taking 30 photographs per second.

\ud83d\ude81 It’s been ~120 years since the Wright Brothers proved that flight was possible on Earth. Now, we are determined to do it on the Red Planet with the #MarsHelicopter! Join us today, March 23, at 1:30pm ET/5:30pm UTC, to discuss the flight zone & more: https://t.co/7nB31DCHTk pic.twitter.com/ip3K2tBdEk

NASA (@NASA) March 23, 2021

Nasa has already determined the terrain over which the helicopter will fly, located north of the rover's landing site. Perseverance still has to finish driving to this runway, "which will take a few more days", said Farah Alibay, in charge of the link between the vehicle and helicopter teams at Nasa.

The latter will then be placed in the right position before being dropped on the ground, under the rover, which will have to roll over it to move away from it. Perseverance will have to clear its view in less than 25 hours, because the helicopter will need the sun to power its solar panels, and thus be able to survive by warming up during the freezing Martian nights. The rover will then position itself from an observation point to capture Ingenuity's prowess with its cameras. Up to five flights of gradual difficulty are planned, spread out over a month.

Composed of four legs, a body and two overlapping propellers, Ingenuity weighs only 1.8 kg and measures 1.2 m from blade tip to blade tip. The program for this helicopter cost Nasa about $85 million.

In the future, such craft could prove crucial for planetary exploration, being able to go where rovers cannot, for example over canyons. The U.S. space agency is working on another flying vehicle project, the Dragonfly mission, which will send a drone to Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in 2026 and reach it in 2034.

Experiments of flight of non-motorized machines on another planet already took place in the past, reminded the Nasa, with the sending in 1985 of balloons-probes on Venus within the framework of the Vega program, a collaboration between the USSR and other countries, of which France.

Source: AFP