Report by Tanya Singh:
More than a century after the first powered flight on Earth, NASA intends to prove that it is possible to reproduce the feat on another world.
Transported aboard the Mars 2020 spacecraft which arrives on the Red Planet on Thursday, the small Ingenuity helicopter will have several challenges to overcome – the biggest being the rarefied Martian atmosphere, which is only one percent of Earth’s density.
It might be called a helicopter, but on the surface it’s more akin to the mini-drones we’ve grown used to seeing in recent years.
Weighing just 1.8 kilograms, its blades are much larger and spin about five times faster – 2,400 rpm – than would be needed to generate the same amount of heave on Earth.It does, however, receive some assistance from Mars, where the gravity is only a third of that of our home planet.
This NASA illustration obtained on February 15, 2021 shows an illustration of the descent to Mars, of the spacecraft containing the NASA Perseverance rover.Like the Perseverance rover, Ingenuity is too far from Earth to be piloted with a joystick, and is therefore designed to fly autonomously.
NASA describes the Ingenuity mission as a “technology demonstration”: a project that seeks to test a new capability with the Perseverance astrobiology mission.
If it is successful, however, it “basically opens up a whole new dimension of Mars exploration,” said Bob Balaram, chief engineer of Ingenuity.
