LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – NASA hopes to catch a moment of the 21st century Wright brothers on Monday as it tries to send a miniature helicopter buzzing over the surface of Mars in what would be the first controlled and motorized flight of an airplane to another planet .
Historical achievements in science and technology may seem humble through conventional measures. The Wright Brothers’ first controlled flight in the world from a motorized airplane, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, covered in 1903 only 120 feet in 12 seconds.
A modest debut is also being reserved with the ingenuity of NASA’s two-rotor solar helicopter.
If all goes flat, the 4-pound vortex will slowly ascend straight to an altitude of 10 feet above the Martian surface, hold in place for 30 seconds, and then rotate before descending to a gentle landing at four legs.
While simple metrics may seem less than ambitious, the “airfield” of interplanetary test flight is 173 million miles from Earth, on the ground of a vast Martian basin called Jezero Crater. Success depends on the ingenuity of executing pre-programmed flight instructions using an autonomous navigation and pilot system.
“The moment our team was waiting for is almost here,” MiMi Aung, project manager at Ingenenuity, said at a recent briefing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles.
NASA itself compares the experiment to the feat of the Wright brothers 117 years ago, paying homage to this modest but monumental first flight by placing a small strip of wing cloth from Wright’s original steering wheel under the solar panel. Ingenuity.
The rotor robot was taken to the red planet tied to the belly of the Mars Perseverance rover, a mobile astrobiology lab that touched down on February 18 in Jezero crater after a nearly seven-month journey through space.
Although the Ingenuity flight test is scheduled to begin around 1:30 a.m., standard mountain time, data confirming its result is not expected to reach JPL mission control until at 4:15 AM MST Monday.
NASA also hopes to receive images and videos of the flight that mission engineers hope to capture using cameras mounted on the helicopter and the Perseverance rover, which will be parked 250 feet from the Ingenuity flight zone.
If the test is successful, Ingenuity will carry out several additional and longer flights in the coming weeks, although it will have to rest for four to five days between each to recharge the batteries. Prospects for future flights are based primarily on a safe four-point touchdown the first time.
“It doesn’t have a self-regulation system, so if we have a bad landing, that will be the end of the mission,” Aung said. An unexpectedly strong gust of wind is a potential danger that could ruin the flight.
NASA hopes that the ingenuity, a technology demonstration independent of Perseverance’s main mission to search for traces of ancient microorganisms, will pave the way for aerial surveillance of Mars and other destinations in the solar system, such as Venus or Saturn’s moon. , Tità.
Although Mars has much less gravity than Earth to overcome, its atmosphere is only 1% denser, presenting a special challenge for aerodynamic elevation. To compensate, the engineers equipped the craft with larger rotor blades (4 feet long) and rotating faster than would be needed on Earth for an aircraft of its size.
The design was successfully tested on vacuum chambers built at JPL to simulate Martian conditions, but it remains to be seen whether the ingenuity will fly to the red planet.
The small, light aircraft already passed a crucial early test proving that it could withstand the punishing cold, with nighttime temperatures dropping to 130 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, using only solar energy to recharge and keep internal components properly heated.
The planned flight was delayed for a week due to a technical error during a rotary test of the aircraft’s rotors on April 9th. NASA said the problem has already been resolved.
(Report by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Edited by Daniel Wallis)
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