The Ingenuity Mars helicopter was by no means presupposed to final this lengthy. NASA engineers constructed and examined the primary self-powered plane to fly on one other planet to reply a easy query: Could the helicopter fly in any respect? The objective was to take 5 flights in 30 Martian days or break the plane attempting.
But greater than 120 Martian days previous that experiment window, Ingenuity continues to be flying and doing issues nobody ever anticipated. The helicopter, which took its first flight on April 19, is breaking its personal information for distance and pace (SN: 4/19/21). It’s serving to the Perseverance rover discover Jezero crater, close to an historical river delta that will maintain indicators of previous Martian life (SN: 2/17/21). And Ingenuity is dealing with altering seasons and navigating over tough terrain, two issues that the flier wasn’t designed to do.
“It’s gotten into a good groove,” says Ingenuity’s unique chief engineer Bob Balaram NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif. “It’s in its element and having fun.”
Here’s what Ingenuity has been as much as on Mars.
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Testing the bounds
Ingenuity is flying farther, quicker and better than it did in its first few flights. The helicopter has lifted itself a most of 12 meters above the Martian floor, zipped alongside at as much as 5 meters per second (about half as quick as record-setting sprinter Florence Griffith-Joyner) and coated 625 meters (a few third the size of the Kentucky Derby) in a single flight. These extremes give engineers helpful details about the bounds of flying on Mars.
“We are still trying to learn lessons,” says JPL robotics engineer Teddy Tzanetos, a group chief for the Ingenuity mission. “Flight after flight, we’re learning the boundaries of performance.”
The Ingenuity craft is now flying over untested, tough Martian terrain. During the helicopter’s thirteenth flight, on September 4, Ingenuity (indicated with the white circle within the video above) took footage of a rocky outcrop from a number of angles. NASA’s Perseverance rover filmed the flight.
Early on, Ingenuity examined its limits in a means that the flight group actually didn’t plan for. During its sixth flight on May 22, the helicopter’s navigation system suffered a glitch that made it roll and sway alarmingly.
The helicopter’s navigation software program retains monitor of the craft’s place by taking a picture, studying the time stamp on that picture and predicting what the digicam ought to see subsequent primarily based on landmarks from earlier photographs that Ingenuity took. If the following picture doesn’t match that prediction, the software program corrects the helicopter’s place and velocity to match up higher.
Less than a minute into the May 22 flight, a single picture acquired misplaced on its means from Ingenuity’s cameras to its onboard pc. That meant that the time stamps on all subsequent photographs have been a little bit off. In attempting to right what it perceived as errors, Ingenuity “went on a wild joyride,” Balaram says.
Luckily, the helicopter touched down safely inside 5 meters of its supposed touchdown spot. The anomaly was a blessing in disguise, Balaram says. It put the helicopter by way of extremes of motion — “how aggressively you can move the joystick, if you will” — that the engineers wouldn’t have requested it to do on objective, and did completely effective, he says.
“It’s a serendipitous thing that we got that flight experience under our belt,” Balaram says. “We have much more confidence in the vehicle.”
Doing science
Originally, the helicopter group wished to push the automobile till it broke. But now the researchers are flying extra cautiously and fewer typically. That’s as a result of the helicopter is at present supporting the Perseverance rover in doing science (SN: 4/30/21).
“We’re no longer in the Month of Ingenuity,” Tzanetos says. “We’re a small part of a much larger team.”
The helicopter has already confirmed its price by telling the rover the place to not go. Ingenuity’s ninth flight, on July 5, took the helicopter over a dune area referred to as South Séítah that might have been tough for the rover to drive by way of safely. Then, Ingenuity photographed some rock outcrops and raised ridges in South Séítah that had regarded attention-grabbing in photographs taken from an orbiting spacecraft. Scientists thought these ridges may report a number of the deepest water environments within the lake that stuffed the crater way back.
In 3-D photographs from the helicopter, it turned out that these ridges didn’t present the layers that might have indicated that the rocks fashioned in deep water. The rover group determined to maneuver on, saving Perseverance an extended, arduous and doubtlessly harmful drive.
“They didn’t have to send the rover all the way to this particular target, and then realize, hey, this may not be the highest priority thing,” Balaram says.
Scouting for the rover has additionally taken Ingenuity over terrain that the helicopter wasn’t designed to know. Ingenuity’s navigation software program was programmed to imagine that the bottom beneath it’s all the time flat as a result of that was the kind of terrain chosen for that experimental first month of flight demonstrations.
“It was a perfectly reasonable simplification for a technology demonstration,” Balaram says. “But it was baked in. And now you’re stuck with a system with a flat ground assumption.”
When the helicopter is flying over a sloped floor, some options appear to maneuver quicker in its view than they’d if the bottom have been flat, giving the helicopter a false sense of its movement. “The onboard navigation has no way of explaining it, except for thinking maybe I’m turning or spinning a bit,” Balaram says. The helicopter finally ends up veering to the aspect.
The group has provide you with some work-arounds, akin to selecting massive sufficient touchdown zones {that a} precision touchdown isn’t crucial and slowing down when flying over tough terrain.
Coping with seasons
The air on Mars is notoriously skinny (SN: 7/14/20). But since mid-September, the ambiance in Jezero crater has been getting even thinner. As that a part of Mars shifts from spring to summer time, the air density has gone from about 1.5 p.c of Earth’s at sea stage, to about 1 p.c.
That doesn’t sound like a giant distinction, nevertheless it’s sufficient that Ingenuity has needed to spin its rotor blades quicker to remain aloft. In October, the helicopter elevated its rotor pace to 2,700 revolutions per minute, in contrast with a earlier most of two,537 rpm.
At that quicker spin pace, the helicopter can fly for under 130 seconds at a time as a substitute of the 170 seconds it managed earlier than, with out operating the danger of the motors overheating.
That can be effective if the helicopter was simply going to hold across the rover in a single space, Tzanetos says. But the Mars duo’s subsequent activity is a race to the long-dry river delta on the mouth of Jezero crater. The Perseverance group hopes to cowl a whole bunch of meters every Martian day. The farthest Ingenuity has coated in a day is 625 meters, and that was with the decrease spin pace.
“It’ll be challenging to keep up,” Tzanetos says.
There’s no technical cause why Ingenuity can’t make it, although, Balaram says. “It’s certainly possible that one day it just won’t wake up. Or a landing will be a failure and we’ll never hear from it again because it tipped over,” he admits. “Those are rolls of the dice, there’s nothing inevitable about those. Barring that, it should keep working for many months.”
Inspiring future fliers
Meanwhile, engineers are already dreaming of the following Martian plane.
“Ingenuity is very exciting, we’re breaking a lot of ground,” Tzanetos says. “The whole point of it is to be that foundation. The important thing is what comes next.”
Current blueprints embody a scaled-up model of Ingenuity that would carry extra tools and work alone or with a rover, and a big hexacopter, with six rotors organized round a central ring. A craft like that would cowl extra floor extra rapidly than a rover, touring distances that would take Perseverance a number of years in only a few months.
A white paper submitted to the 2023–2032 planetary science and astrobiology decadal survey — a once-a-decade assessment of the fields’ objectives and priorities — suggests a number of potential missions for a Mars Science Helicopter. In one, the craft may take samples of clay minerals at a website like Mawrth Vallis, a channel regarded as carved by a long-ago flood.
Mawrth was a finalist for the final two Mars rover touchdown websites and is a contender for the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin rover, set to launch in 2022. Clays can protect natural materials on Earth, so a mission to Mawrth may seek for indicators of life.
A helicopter may additionally discover craters with water ice deposits with slopes too steep for rover wheels. And by taking measurements at a number of totally different altitudes, the helicopter may assist work out how the ambiance exchanges gases with the bottom, which may assist resolve the thriller of when and the way Mars misplaced its liquid water (SN: 11/12/20). Or a helicopter may map the magnetic area of enormous swaths of the Martian floor, revealing when and the way the Red Planet misplaced its molten core (SN: 2/24/20).
And every time astronauts get round to visiting Mars, “it might be useful to have fleets of drones zipping around the skies, carrying loads or scouting ahead,” Tzanetos says. “That’s the exciting future I’m looking forward to.”