Sorry to drone on and on but have you heard of Ingenuity? NASA's camera-copter is ready to head off to Mars NASA this week championed its autonomous helicopter Ingenuity, which is next month due to blast off to Mars attached to its buddy, the Perseverance rover. Ingenuity measures 1.2 metres (4ft) across, and is neatly folded and stowed away underneath Perseverance. The flying gizmo weighs just under two kilograms (4lb), and sports …
I can't wait to see the first footage of a successful flight.
I am stupidly excited about this given my general ignorance of the physics, astrophysics, chemistry, engineering, etc that has gone into this. We already have a car on another planet (2 if include the moon buggy), and now we're getting a helicopter.
One of the saddest realizations I had this year was how few more space missions and launches I'm likely to live to see (making it through another 30 years will be ambitious). There's just something epic about them all....
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My first thought too.
I can only assume (without any other knowledge of the Perseverence mission) that the top of the lander is covered with other instrumentation: cameras, solar panels etc, that are of higher priority to the mission overall than an experimental minor element.
As such they've had to come up with an inventive alternative solution (aka a bodge) in order to add the drone to the mission.
"Why Didn't they put in on the top?"
The two things that come to mind are:
1. Landing on Mars is quite difficult. Fewer than half the dozen of so attempted landings have been successful. They very likely put the helicopter experiment where it would be the least problem during descent.
2. This is their first attempt. If their aircraft fails during its initial flght for some unexpected reason, they probably don't want it to drop onto their rover.
It's a neat idea. I wouldn't have thought it to be practical. Good for them.
Didn't they put in on the top?
Its getting carried on what amounts to a car. The car needs to land wheels down and balance, so you want as much weight as possible between the axles and as low down as you can get it while preserving your ground clearance requirements. Same reasons you do it on a good race car.
After watching that earth bound lab test of the drone deployment, I don't have a lot of confidence it is going to work. It looked like they had a couple of technicians with crow bars trying to get the deployment mechanism to work. We all know how disasters happen so easy on Mars! I reference the failed drilling device on that last fiasco!
I was wondering how this helicopter drone was tested. I read that it has been flown in a large vacuum chamber* (~600 Pa or ~ 6 mb at Mars' surface), but gravity is also lower on Mars and can't be conveniently simulated.
Apparently it can only fly for 90 seconds before it needs to spend a day recharging! I presume that that's about keeping its weight down. It's there as a proof of concept rather than as a tool.
*see https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/science/mars-helicopter-nasa.html
They tested it in the very large vacuum chamber at NASA Glenn Research Center to simulate the atmospheric conditions. They used a rope and pulley system to simulate the gravity difference. While this has some impact on the control behaviour of the craft, that difference is easy to predict and compensate
have you seen a photo of it? The blades are long and wide and apparently fold up nicely for the trip to Mars. I think the total rotor diameter is over 1 meter, and they would have had to construct them from super-light-weight material, maybe like model airplane wings? [yeah I used to build those when I was a kid, paper and balsa wood]
Although i would expect carbon nanotubes from NASA...
(duckduckgo search, "mars helicopter photo", lots of hits, some with people so you can get a size reference)
The hardest part is landing and the Perseverance rover is the main mission. The whirlybird is just gravy (and even NASA calls it a technology demonstration).
I wish the boffins best of luck with all phases of the mission.
I just hope neither the US Space Force nor Elon takes over the concept.
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