NASA to send Perseverance, a new trundle bot, and Ingenuity, the first interplanetary helicopter, to sniff out life on Mars in July NASA is gearing up to launch its Perseverance rover and Ingenuity drone helicopter to hunt for signs of microbial life on Mars next month. The Mars 2020 mission is the first step towards the space agency’s goal of obtaining samples of rock and soil and preparing them for return back to Earth. "Fifty-one years ago today, NASA …
The rotors will have to be larger to compensate for the thinner atmosphere but not proportionally larger because of the reduced gravity on Mars.
We know they keep a duplicate rover on Earth so they can test it. I don't know how they can replicate the conditions to test a Mars helicopter. Perhaps they will run it in a semi-vacuum while suspended on a counterweight to simulate the reduced gravity?
As all scientific and engineering knowledge on the planet is contained in the heads of the El Reg commentards perhaps someone could enlighten me.
If I recall correctly, Mars has an atmosphere a couple of orders of magnitude thinner than earth's and martian gravity is something like 4/5ths of earth's. The difference in gravity is a lot less than the difference in air density, so you need to push a much larger volume rate of martian air down to attain lift than you would on earth, so you either need a big rotor (unwieldy and difficult to make strong) or you need to spin a smaller one very, very fast, which is almost certainly easier to do. The rotor would need a cross section designed with that in mind. (i.e the aerofoil section needs to be different for different air densities and volume flow rates)
Gravity at this scale is very well understood. Perhaps it is sufficient to test the rotors and the lift they produce at various speeds in a partial vacuum representative of Martian atmosphere density. They can then simulate the lower gravity by testing the rotors and motors on a mock-up copter that is 2/5th the weight of the real thing which works out to the same lift requirement, but using good old Earth gravity. No surprises left in this type of physics.
Have we any details of the plans for returning the samples to Earth?
Presumably this involves some sort of rocket from surface to orbit, where it meets up with an orbiter with enough fuel to break out of orbit and head home.
Mars has lower gravity, so less oomph needed than for earthly rockets, but that's still a lot of mass to shift off Earth, to Mars, land/orbit, and then lift off. Is SpaceX working on Falcon9M?
Current plan seems to be...
Perseverance takes samples, puts these in a sealed tube, and drops them on the ground, moving off to the next sample area (around 20 to 30 samples in total).
Another mission in a few years sends an orbiter, which includes an Earth return entry vehicle.
A 3rd mission has a collection rover and an ascent vehicle. The rover drives around and picks all the samples, loads them into the ascent vehicle, which then docks with the orbiter, which transfers the samples to the Earth return vehicle, and sends them on their way.
Everything past Perseverance still seems to be in concept and/or design, nothing actually being built yet. So may not happen at all, or may get changed around.
Highly unlikely. Very few of the teams on Earth are remembered other than by people in the industry and very interested spectators such as some of those reading here. I bet few people, even here, can name more than a one or two of the Apollo mission team. Most of the public won't have a clue and will probably have difficulty remembering Buzz Aldrin let alone Michael Collins. That's assuming they even believe the Moon landing even happened!
Unsung heroes all, but they are called unsung for a reason.
Challenge accepted. Off the top of my head:
Crew - Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins.
Flight directors - Gene Krantz, Chris Kraft
CapCom's - Charlie Duke, Jim Lovell, Ken Mattingly, Bruce McCandless, Bill Anders, Harrison Schmidt
Geologist Adviser - Gene Shoemaker (as in the comet).
There were certainly more of each of the directors and CapComs (4 or 5 shifts overall, with one or two for each). But those are the ones that spring to mind.
Admittedly I can only remember the CapComs as they're all Astronaut heroes in their own right, and Chris Kraft as he died not so long ago (and got a decent amount of his due credit during the recent anniversary) and was almost as much of a dude as Gene Krantz is.
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