by The Smithsonian would love to showcase the first vehicle to achieve powered flight on another planet, but with NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter still busy setting records on Mars, the Washington, DC institution has accepted the next best thing.
Officials from NASA and the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum marked the agency’s donation of the aerial prototype for Ingenuity into the museum’s collection at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia on Friday (December 15). The full-scale prototype was the first to demonstrate that an aircraft could fly in another planet’s atmosphere during tests conducted at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
The first free flight of the prototype in a simulated environment on Mars gave NASA the confidence to commit to sending Ingenuity to Mars. The helicopter and its companion Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021.
“This has been at the top of my wish list ever since I heard Ingenuity was flying along with Endurance,” Matt Shindell, curator of planetary science and exploration at the National Air and Space Museum, said in an interview. by collectSPACE .com. “I really wanted to bring some piece of it into the museum at some point [the Mars Helicopter’s] a development that would speak to the development process of this new technology and that would show that technology itself in future exhibitions.”
The flight of the prototype on May 31, 2016 took place in JPL’s Space Simulator, a 25-foot-wide (7.6-meter) vacuum chamber. The Martian atmosphere was simulated by first evacuating the air from the chamber and then backfilling it with a small amount of carbon dioxide.
Related: Mars Ingenuity Helicopter: The first aircraft to fly on the Red Planet
The prototype was built to be the same size as the rotorcraft flown to Mars, but differed in construction in several significant ways.
“The system was still a skeleton,” said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity’s project manager, in a 2020 presentation given as part of a workshop on planetary exploration robots. “There was the [infrared] tracking balls to track the movement of the helicopter in the room, but there was no power system on board, no computer on board. He was really just an activist, but that allowed us to give children our way forward.”
“A lot of ingenuity [was] advancing the entire project one step at a time to prepare for launch,” said Tzanetos. “Here [the first flight of the prototype] The big check mark for the project was to say, ‘Yes! We can fly under control in the atmosphere of Mars. Let’s move on to the next step.'”
More complete engineering models followed the prototype that integrated the necessary systems for the Mars Helicopter. As of Friday, Ingenuity had completed 67 flights, including 63 flights focused on scouting the path forward for the Perseverance rover. His team is now preparing to fly Ingenuity on its longest flight to date – 2,717 feet (828 m) – well beyond the current distance record of 2,310 feet (704 m) set on flight 25 in 2022 .
Ingenuity’s 68th flight is targeting a top speed of 22.4 miles per hour (36 kph), which tied a speed record set last October. The hop will last 147 seconds and will take the helicopter a maximum of 33 feet (10 m) above the Martian surface.
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While Ingenuity continues to fly, preservation and treatment of its prototype will begin so that the Smithsonian can properly store and display it for years to come. A decision has yet to be made as to where it will be displayed at the National Air and Space Museum.
“What is sent to Mars, except in rare cases, does not come back to us,” Shindell said. “So what we tend to collect are the prototypes and the engineering models, the things that are developed on the way to a successful spacecraft mission and then allow the engineers to troubleshoot and develop the technology as they go. they.”
“We are happy that they can also stand in for the flying spacecraft, but really what determines their importance to us as curators and the reason they belong to the museum collection is that they played a central role in the development of the aviation mission,” he said. “This prototype is really a great example of why these unknown articles are historically significant and need to be preserved by museums.”
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