Tag: helicopter
Watch a replica of NASA’s Mars helicopter take flight on Earth
NASA helicopter captures glorious view of Mars, with some surprises
NASA‘s extraterrestrial helicopter, Ingenuity, flew 40 feet into the Martian air and snapped an astonishing landscape on another world.
On its 51st flight, the experimental craft — with rotors reaching four feet long from tip to tip — rose atop a hill just beyond the rim of Belva crater. The recently released view is grandiose. It looks, dare one say, earthly. The rocky desert is in the foreground. Eroded, windswept hills roll through the horizon. The sky is bright.
And scattered among the vista are some curious signs of human exploration.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
Here they are:
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Helicopter legs: On the right and left sides of Ingenuity’s image you can spot the ends of two of the spacecraft’s legs as it hovers in the air.
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Helicopter shadow: At center-right, just to the right of a small grey rock, you can see Ingenuity’s small shadow on the ground.
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The Perseverance rover: Perhaps most conspicuous is NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed with Ingenuity in February 2021 with a primary goal of seeking out potential evidence of past microbial life on Mars — if any ever existed, that is. The car-sized, six-wheeled rover is near the top left.
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Rover tracks: You can also spot the large robot’s trail. From Perseverance, follow two horizontal lines running to the right across the image. The wheels are metallic, so they’re truly noisy as they rumble over Mars’ rocky terrain.
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Trash!: When the rover and its landing gear plummeted through the Martian atmosphere before a series of challenging landing maneuvers, debris such as wires and insulation were scattered throughout the desert. Just below the rover you can spot what NASA calls a “small piece of debris.”
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
All of Ingenuity’s grand aerial views are an unexpected gift. Mission planners hoped they could get five flights out of the little chopper. Now it’s exceeded 50, with many more planned.
The experimental Mars explorer is currently flying over more challenging terrain, a region rife with “dunes, boulders, and rocks, and surrounded by hills that could have us for lunch,” Josh Anderson, NASA’s Ingenuity operations lead, explained a couple weeks ago.
Stay tuned as Ingenuity and Perseverance explore deeper into Mars’ Jezero Crater, a land that is arid desert today, but once teemed with flowing water and muddy deltas.
Mars Helicopter ‘Ingenuity’ Completes 50th Flight After Two Years on Mars
CNN reports that the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) helicopter has now “surpassed all expectations,” transitioning into “an aerial scout for the Perseverance rover as it explores an ancient lake and river delta on Mars.”
Each morning, the Helicopter Base Station on the Perseverance rover searches for Ingenuity’s signal around the time the chopper is expected to “wake up,” waiting for a sign that its aerial scout is still functioning. But Ingenuity’s solar panels, batteries and rotor system are healthy. The chopper is “still doing fantastic,” said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We’re looking forward to just keep pushing that envelope.”
Since the helicopter left the flat floor of Jezero Crater and headed to the river delta in January, its flights have only grown more challenging. Ingenuity has flown over uncharted and rugged terrain with landing spots surrounded by potential hazards. “We are not in Martian Kansas anymore,” said Josh Anderson, Ingenuity operations lead at JPL, in a statement. “We’re flying over the dried-up remnants of an ancient river that is filled with sand dunes, boulders, and rocks, and surrounded by hills that could have us for lunch. And while we recently upgraded the navigation software onboard to help determine safe airfields, every flight is still a white-knuckler….”
Ingenuity’s team is already planning its next set of flights because the chopper has to remain at the right distance to stay in touch with the fast-moving rover, which can drive for hundreds of meters in a single day… The Perseverance rover is moving on from an area that could contain hydrated silica, which might have information about a warmer, wetter Martian past and any potential signs of life from billions of years ago. Up next is Mount Julian, a site that will provide the rover with a panoramic view into Belva Crater.
Ingenuity’s journey has demonstrated how useful aircraft can be on space missions, scouting places that rovers can’t go or helping plot a safe path to the next destination.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NASA released wild footage of Mars helicopter flying over an alien desert
The future is here.
NASA is regularly flying a robotic helicopter around Mars while a car-sized rover below zaps rocks with a laser as it searches for potential signs of past life. The space agency recently celebrated the Ingenuity helicopter’s whopping 50th flight over the Martian desert, as it flew well over 1,000 feet and reached an altitude of nearly 60 feet.
“Just as the Wright brothers continued their experiments well after that momentous day at Kitty Hawk in 1903, the Ingenuity team continues to pursue and learn from the flight operations of the first aircraft on another world,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, said in a statement.
While announcing the landmark flight, NASA also included recent footage of Ingenuity’s 47th flight, which you can watch below. NASA’s Perseverance rover filmed this clip from almost 400 feet away.
“This video shows the dust initially kicked up by the helicopter’s spinning rotors, as well as Ingenuity taking off, hovering, and beginning its 1,444-foot (440-meter) journey to the southwest,” the space agency explained. “The rotorcraft landed — off camera — at Airfield ‘Iota.'”
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS
Folks, this might not be an epic Schwarzenegger action scene, but it is wild. Before 2021, humanity had never flown a powered aircraft on another planet. Now the Ingenuity helicopter, an experimental robot, has vastly exceeded engineers’ expectations. NASA hoped to prove it could fly something on Mars. But the helicopter has flown 50 flights, with many more planned. And we can watch it zooming over another planet’s rocky, red desert.
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The successful helicopter, with rotors reaching four feet long from tip to tip, has also proven that NASA can build aerial “scouts” for future extraterrestrial endeavors. “Every time Ingenuity goes airborne, it covers new ground and offers a perspective no previous planetary mission could achieve,” NASA said.
“We are not in Martian Kansas anymore.”
The chopper’s extraterrestrial journey, however, is growing more perilous. The robot is venturing through Mars’ Jezero Crater, a place that once hosted a rich river delta — an environment that could have hosted Martian life, if any ever existed, that is. But the terrain is no longer flat. NASA engineers are guiding Ingenuity through an area with “dunes, boulders, and rocks, and surrounded by hills that could have us for lunch,” explained Josh Anderson, NASA’s Ingenuity operations lead.
“We are not in Martian Kansas anymore,” he said.