Helicopter on Mars!

The impossible has once again been made possible! I imagine that the feelings running through the minds of many of the NASA employees on April 16th would be similar to that of the Wright brothers in 1903 during the first flight. NASA flew a drone on Mars on April 16th, 2021 and it was a brilliant moment. Surpassing the Wright brothers' 12-second first flight, the drone, called Ingenuity, was in the air for 40 seconds. This is the first powered controlled flight by an aircraft on another planet ever! Let me give you a moment to let that sink in…

Ingenuity was carried to Mars inside NASA's Perseverance Rover that landed on Mars' Jezero Crater in February. Throughout the entire project, the Wright brothers were constantly in the minds of all the workers. As MiMi Aung, the project manager for Ingenuity at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), told BBC, this is their 'Wright brothers moment'. To emphasize just how important the Wright brothers were to them, Ingenuity carries a small postage-stamp-sized piece of cloth from the wings of Flyer 1, the first aircraft that flew in 1903. How cool is that?

Now, technical details. The drone has two cameras - one black and white camera on its base to assist in navigation and one higher resolution camera looking out at the horizon. The drone rose to just over 3 meters high, hovered for a few seconds, turned 96 degrees, hovered for a few more seconds, and then landed back down. This 40-second maneuver required a lot of planning and calculations. The atmosphere on Mars is only 1% of the density here on Earth. Accordingly, the blades on the drone would have had very little to cut into to gain liftoff. One factor that did help the drone gain liftoff on Mars was gravity. The gravity on Mars is about one-third that of on Earth, so it didn't hold the drone back down as much, due to a much weaker attraction force. Ingenuity was very light in weight but had a power of 2500 rpm for the blades. The control was completely autonomous. The distance to Mars made any control by radio signals impossible.

MiMi Aung was asked if she was surprised the flight had worked, given her reaction upon the news of the drone being successful where she tore up a contingency speech. In the BCC interview, she said, "No, I'm not. We really had nailed the equations, the models, and the verification here on Earth in our laboratory tests. So, it then became a question of: have we chosen the right materials to build Ingenuity, to survive the space environment, to survive the Mars environment?" ingenuity had been tested multiple times back on Earth in Mars-like conditions before the drone was sent to Mars inside Perseverance. In 2019, the drone underwent tests in a cylindrical vacuum chamber at JPL in Pasadena. Air was sucked out and carbon dioxide was pumped into the 85-foot-tall chamber to mimic the atmosphere on Mars. Martian temperature shifts were replicated, as was the potential for crosswinds.

And here comes the future… NASA already has plans for larger helicopter drones, more scientific expeditions in earlier inaccessible terrains. The next helicopter mission is titled 'Dragonfly' and is a mission to Titan, the big moon of Saturn. It is said to arrive on Titan in the mid-2030s. (I will be thirty myself…)

This is a wonderful accomplishment from every perspective. If you can take anything from all of this, it's that scientists are willing to wait for years for a few-second flight on another planet. The rover was aptly named Perseverance. One day, who knows, a commercial airline can fly on Mars? Air Mars? Mars Airlines? JetMars?

References :

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56799755

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/13/mars-ingenuity-helicopter-delay/