Nuked Nasa has locked in a location on Mars for the first demo flight of its mini helicopter named ingenuity. The four-pound rotorcraft is gearing up to attempt the first powered flight on another planet.
Ingenuity survived a seven-month trek through deep space and an intense landing sequence through Mars’ atmosphere. Engineers analyzed orbital imagery to find a prime flight zone to drop off ingenuity for its first flight.
‘we might just have a really great airfield right in front of our noses,’ says grip. The helicopter’s AI-powered navigation camera can spot the landing site.
Perseverance is in the middle of a days-long drive to the flight zone, just 196 feet away from the landing site. When it arrives, the craft will be lowered to the ground. Then perseverance will spend roughly 25 hours driving about 330 feet away to a location NASA named the van Zyl overlook.
Ingenuity will need to be flipped from its current horizontal position on the rover to a vertical position before touching the ground. Ingenuity’s integration with perseverance will take’multiple days’.
Lockheed Martin designed the Mars helicopter delivery system that will help ingenuity’s tiny landing legs set foot on the ground. Lockheed’s top engineer Jeremy morrey said he had to toss all that heritage and knowledge aside and literally start from scratch with a new electrical connection design.
The helicopter’s flight zone is shaped like a mini running track, with a box-shaped takeoff and return area on one side of the zone. A successful first flight will mean’to complete mission success’.
Ingenuity will hover in place for about 30 seconds, turn in midair, then descend for a landing landing. A navigation camera on ingenuity’s underside will be snapping 30 photos per second of the ground to inform its movement.
Cameras aboard perseverance will aim to capture the helicopter in flight. All of those pictures will eventually be transmitted back to earth.
Four more flight tests are planned in a month-long window after ingenuity’s first 10-foot takeoff. What the helicopter does during those flight tests will largely depend on the results of the first one.
Ingenuity’s test campaign will likely come to an end. It’s a demo mission, and perseverance has other ambitions to focus on.
A mission to Venus by the Soviet Union in the 1980s claimed the title for first off-world flight. Two balloon aerobots (not powered) flew into the clouds of Venus. If successful, ingenuity will mark the first powered flight on another world.
