NASA’s tiny helicopter ready to keep going
Its next mission will involve helping rover’s exploration and search for past life on Mars
NASA’s tiny helicopter is not ready for retirement.
Ingenuity’s one-month mission was upped on Friday, and the helicopter will now help the Perseverance rover as it searches for signs of ancient Martian life.
“Our team has been extremely happy and proud of Ingenuity’s flight to date,” MiMi Aung, Ingenuity’s project manager, said during a NASA news conference, “and now it’s like Ingenuity is graduating.”
The helicopter, weighing 4 pounds on Earth and 1.5 pounds on Mars, was a technology demonstration to prove powered, controlled flight is possible on the Red Planet. Its fourth flight occurred Friday morning, with the helicopter climbing 16 feet, moving 436 feet south and returning to land where it took off.
The helicopter’s systems have performed beyond expectations, enabling additional flights. But more importantly, the Perseverance science team has determined that Ingenuity won’t hinder the rover’s exploration.
The Perseverance science team is going to explore the area rather than quickly driving to another part of the Martian surface. If the rover had driven farther away, the helicopter would be too slow to tag along. Ingenuity has to use solar panels to recharge its batteries between flights.
“Based on the rocks that we have seen in the area, we really wish to spend a considerable amount of time where we are,” said Ken Farley, the mission’s
project scientist and a professor of geochemistry at Caltech. “So it’s sort of a fortuitous alignment of these two things.”
In this nearby area, he said the rover could find rocks, potentially mudstones, that were deposited in the middle of the lake that once filled Jezero Crater.
“This is the kind of environment that we expect to be most habitable by organisms that might have existed on Mars billions of years ago,” he said, “as well as having the capability to preserve biosignatures over the billions of years since the climate changed and the lake dried.”
The rover will likely spend the next several hundred Martian days in the nearby region, collecting samples that it will ultimately leave in caches on the planet’s surface. A mission is being planned to collect the samples and return them to Earth.
Ingenuity might assist the rover by providing aerial images of rocks and other features that interest the science team. It might also fly into regions the rover cannot reach.
“Technology demonstrations like Ingenuity are really, really important,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. “We’ve learned so much from this little technology demonstration that will enable future aerial systems and explorers.”
The helicopter’s first flight was April 19. It lifted itself 10 feet, hovered and then came back down. It began moving laterally on subsequent flights, going farther and faster.
Friday’s flight will be essential in finding Ingenuity’s next home. Images from the flight will be used to create 3D digital elevation maps and find a safe landing spot along Perseverance’s southern route.
Then Ingenuity will take a one-way trip to that airfield. After this fifth flight, the helicopter will transition to an operations demonstration phase that’s slated to last 30 Martian days.
It is expected to fly less frequently during this operations demonstration. Then the team will reevaluate if the helicopter will continue flying.
“We’ll check on the health of the helicopter,” Glaze said. “We’ll see if it’s being helpful to Perseverance, or if there are impacts to the ability of Perseverance to do its core science jobs.”
The tiny helicopter does have a finite life. Ingenuity was only designed to survive its 30-Martian-day window for technology demonstration flights. Some of its commercial parts were not designed for the rigors of space.
Its components are repeatedly freezing and thawing, and the helicopter team expects something will eventually break.
“We will be celebrating each day that Ingenuity survives and operates beyond the original window,” Aung said.