Jakarta –
The US space agency (NASA) said it would fly the first helicopters on Mars in early April.
The small helicopter was taken to the Red Planet by Perseverance explorers, who made a dramatic landing at Jezero Crater about a month ago.
The helicopter, called Ingenuity, the 1.8kg twin-rotor plane, will attempt a series of short hops in the purified Mars air.
If successful, the moment would represent something of a “Wright Brothers moment,” NASA said.
The statement naturally refers to Orville and Wilbur Wright, who in 1903 made the historic first heavier-than-air powered aircraft flight on Earth.
And to mark the link, the agency revealed that a piece of cloth the size of a postage stamp from the Wright brothers’ airplane wing had been taped to Ingenuity.
A piece of cloth the size of a postage stamp from the wing of the Wright brothers has been taped to Ingenuity. (NASA / JPL-CALTECH)
Currently, the helicopter is still attached to Perseverance’s belly. The protective covers were removed over the weekend and in the coming days the aircraft will be lowered to the ground.
The technicians have identified a 10m x 10m area in Jezero which they call the “airfield”.
The area was at one end of the 90m-long “fly zone”, where maybe five sorties would be carried out.
Perseverance will go to great lengths to record everything on camera.
“We will do our best to capture everything from Ingenuity in flight,” said NASA engineer Farah Alibay.
“We’re going to take pictures, we hope to shoot videos.”
This would be challenging, he warned. Both the rover and the helicopter function independently and carry separate clocks. A timer device needs to be synchronized for the photography to capture the action.
Ingenuity’s protective cover will open over the weekend (NASA / JPL-CALTECH)
Ingenuity is designed to be super light. This is done so that Ingenuity can achieve lift in the thin atmosphere of Mars.
This NASA helicopter is made of four purpose-built carbon fiber blades, arranged into two 1m long rotors that rotate in opposite directions at a speed of about 2,400 revolutions per minute.
This speed is many times faster than the propellers used by passenger helicopters on Earth.
The engineers planned the first flight to be a simple flight in which the helicopter rose about 3m above the ground, hovered and rotated for about 30 seconds, before descending again.
If all goes well, the next flight will be even more complex.
“At the moment, what we are planning is the first three flights to demonstrate basic capabilities – hover and traverse, go over a longer distance in the flight zone and come back,” Ingenuity’s chief pilot Havard Grip told BBC News.
“If all goes well, we might try to develop our capabilities. But we haven’t planned it in detail.”
Asked if the team might try something dramatic for the final flight, the Ingenuity chief pilot refused to speculate.
The fly zone is close to where Perseverance landed in February (NASA / JPL-CALTECH)
Lori Glaze, who directs NASA’s planetary science efforts, said Ingenuity could open up possibilities for aerial exploration in the future.
“Can we imagine areas that are invisible from outer space or that cannot be reached by explorers? Can helicopters guide explorers and help plan the most efficient paths to achieve the best possible knowledge? Can we support future human missions with air capabilities?” he mused.
“That’s a question for another day, but the tech demo gave us the leeway to be creative and test new things.”
NASA has approved a mission called Dragonfly which will use robotic helicopters to fly over the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan in the 2030s.
The Soviets were the first countries to fly aerial vehicles in another world with their Vega balloons in the Venus atmosphere in the 1980s.
(ita / ita)
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