NASA has revealed a new ‘motion filter’ video of the history-making Ingenuity helicopter flying on Mars showing just where the dust travelled around the craft.
While Ingenuity was sent to the Red Planet as a ‘technical demonstration’ with no science mission of its own, NASA says it could help scientists better understand how dust travels through the atmosphere of the Red Planet.
The video, shot by the Mastcam-Z camera on the Perseverance rover, reveals plumes of Martian dust made by Ingenuity upon takeoff and landing.
After the successful flight on Monday April 19, NASA named the airfield that hosted the takeoff the ‘Wright Brothers Field’ in honour of the aeroplane inventors.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) say they will now be pushing the 4lb helicopter ‘to the limit’ in a series of future flights between now and early-May.
While Ingenuity was sent to the Red Planet as a ‘technical demonstration’ with no science mission of its own, NASA says this could help scientists better understand how dust travels through the atmosphere of the Red Planet
In the new video, a ghostly ‘cut-out’ of the helicopter is visible, which is an artefact related to the digital processing involved in creating the short clip, says NASA.
The flight, according to NASA, was flawless. It was a gentle take off, with a little push by the wind when it climbed higher altitudes, but was very steady with just the tiniest bounce upon landing.
Having motion filter footage showing the dust around the craft can help NASA as it looks to construct larger and more advanced Mars helicopters in the future.
Along with the epic video, shared side-by-side with the motion capture version, Ingenuity also snapped an image showing the moment before its landing legs touched back down after what is being called a ‘Wright Brothers moment.’
While soaring through the thin atmosphere of Mars, Ingenuity snapped 30 pictures per second to help it monitor its own path, and one image shows the moment before its legs are about to meet the ground.
Flying on Mars is particularly challenging due to the fact its atmosphere is just one percent of Earth’s at ground level, and while the lower gravity, a third of that on Earth, helps, it is only a partial offset against the thinner atmosphere.
This means that in order to fly, the helicopter has to be ultra-light and rotate its blades extremely fast in order to achieve lift. For this week’s test flight the blades spun to 2,500rpm, allowing it to hover 10 feet off the ground.
That is up five times faster than the blades of a helicopter on Earth.
Smaller choppers’ blades spin up to 500 times a minute in flight, while larger aircraft such as twin-rotored copters such as Chinooks may only spin their blades 225 times a minute.
‘What is exciting is that this helicopter has flown hundreds, if not thousands of times, but always in simulations, said Håvard Fjær Grip, Ingenuity Chief Pilot.
The 19 inch tall and 4ft diameter wide helicopter completed the first powered, controlled flight on another planet on Monday, and will attempt to complete four more test flights involving further distances and higher altitudes in the next two weeks.
That first historic flight involved the craft firing up its rotors to 2,500 rpm, lifting up to 10ft, hovering for 30 seconds and then landing safely on the surface.
MiMi Aung, the project manager for the rotorcraft, said she expects Ingenuity will ‘meet its limit’ by the final flight test, likely crashing into the Martian surface.
Along with the epic video, Ingenuity also snapped an image showing the moment before its landing legs touched back down after what is being called a ‘Wright Brothers moment’
Ingenuity took off from a 30-by-30ft strip of land on Mars at 3:34amET, but was christened during the briefing that shared updates of the helicopter. It has now been named ‘Wright Brothers Field’
Aung said she got ‘goose bumps’ while watching footage of the helicopter’s first successful flight, after six years of effort in testing, travel and flight.
‘Ultimately, because going faster, further, our models match what we saw in our flight chamber, but we want to push against the wind, we want to push against the speed, and ultimately we expect the helicopter will meet its limit.
‘This is about finding unknowns that we can’t model, and we really want to know what the limits are, so we will be pushing the limits very deliberately.’
Proving the success of a flying machine on another world will help future NASA engineers prepare for planetary missions with an airborne component.
Mars Helicopter’s chief engineer Bob Balaram said he envisaged a chopper 15 times heavier being able to fly on the planet in the coming years.
Something around 50 pounds, able to carry up to nine pounds of scientific equipment, could be sent to Mars on a future mission, he explained.
‘Early design work on that has started to see what it would take to deploy these and operate them… but anything much larger, the packaging of the blades becomes quite awkward, so it may not be quite feasible in the near-term.’
Steve Jurczyk, NASA’s acting administrator, heralded the flight as ‘the start of a whole new kind of planetary exploration’.
‘It’s the start of a whole new kind of planetary exploration and we’ll build our engineering success to see how we can deploy this capability on future Mars missions,’ he said during a press conference after the flight.
Ingenuity arrived at the Jezero Crater on February 18 after an eight-month journey spanning nearly 300 million miles, tucked inside the belly of Perseverance.
After the spacecraft landed, it dropped the drone on to the ground so Ingenuity could prepare for its maiden flight.
The flight, according to NASA, was flawless. It was a gentle take off, with a little push by the wind when it climbed higher altitudes, but was very steady with just the tiniest bounce upon landing. Pictured is the data confirming Ingenuity’s successful flight
It is armed with two rotors that spin in opposite directions to lift the drone off the ground, with a much lighter body than would be found on an Earth-based vehicle.
As well as the lower gravity, the helicopter faces the challenge of flying in the Martian atmosphere, which is about 100 times thinner than Earth’s.
As it is a technology demonstration, the helicopter does not have any scientific instruments on board.
Ingenuity as seen on Mars on April 7, 2021 in a photo taken by the rover Perseverance. If the 08:30 BST flight is a success then it will become the first powered, controlled flight to take off and land on another planet, giving NASA their own ‘Wright Brothers moment’
It is designed to be mostly autonomous, so NASA will not be able to control the helicopter remotely, relying exclusively on the onboard AI to control flight.
This is because of the distance between Earth and Mars – it takes more than 11 minutes to get a radio signal back to Earth.
It is unlikely future versions will be controllable by humans, unless it is sent to the planet along with the first human mission in 2035.
The technology tested in this Mars copter could allow additional support to survey the terrain for rovers and humans alike in the future, NASA explained.
‘It could also access difficult to access cliffs that cannot be reached by rovers. A whole new way to explore the alien terrain in our solar system is now at our disposal.’