by It is difficult to understate the importance of the milestone achieved by NASA’s Mars helicopter, Ingenuity.
The small (1.8kg) helicopter touched down with the Endurance rover in 2021. On January 25, NASA announced that the flying vehicle had to make an emergency landing that damaged one of its rotors and ended its mission.
This reminds us that space exploration is still difficult. But Ingenuity’s three years on Mars proved that controlled powered flight on Mars was possible.
The small helicopter lasted much longer than expected and flew higher and further than many expected. Beyond this Martian experiment, the success of the rotorcraft paves the way for other missions that use flying vehicles to explore planets and moons.
The first landings on the Moon were static. 1969 was probably the most important year for space exploration, when Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 brought astronauts to the surface of the moon, but 1970 was the year for planetary exploration.
In 1970, we had our first soft landing on another planet, Venus. The first robotic prototype delivered to Earth from the Moon. And the first robot rover to drive around another body (also the Moon).
Since then, after more than 50 years of planetary exploration and technological development, there have been only a small number of successful surface missions, and even fewer have been able to move. A dozen static landers visited Venus between 1970 and 1985, and never again.
From rovers to helicopters
Mars was landed on Mars only three times between 1971 and 1976 before the Pathfinder lander and Sojourner rover arrived in 1997. Europe’s Huygens spacecraft landed on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2005.
These attempts to reach the surface are rare, very difficult, and, historically, the landers have hardly ever been mobile. But the Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance of Nasa Mars surpassed their designs and went further and further.
And Ingenuity flew.
It was not the first spacecraft to fly. Those are the balloons used by the Soviet Vega 1 and 2 missions, which floated over Venus in 1985. But Ingenuity had control, cameras and connectivity. He photographed his rover and Mars from a completely new perspective. He commanded the world’s attention and captured our hearts.
In Moscow, I had the opportunity to see models and replicas of the Vega balloons and the first lunar rover. They impressed me more than the few Mars rovers in use at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. The Soviet missions were more famous and varied, and they were from generations ago, before my time and long before my career as a planetary scientist.
Ingenuity was clever, original and completely new. The photos he took, persistently finding the discarded technology from the manned module that carried down to Mars and the Martian views from a bird’s eye view, were amazing. Meanwhile, persistence took video of Ingenuity flying in the air. Nothing like he had ever seen before.
Future flights
Ingenuity had a rough ride getting there, however. The entire mission of Mars 2020 (Persistence, Ingenuity and their transport systems) was sudden.
After NASA withdrew from the European Space Agency’s joint ExoMars program, which includes the Mars rover mission, the US space agency began developing one on its own. This rover, later called Endurance, went from announcement to concept to development and launch in just seven and a half years.
And Ingenuity was not initially included on board. As an idea, it was proposed late in the development phase of Mars 2020, and there was considerable opposition. It added additional complexity, cost, risk and new modes of failure. It was also driven by an engineering purpose, with the possibility of a bit of outreach—the opportunity to communicate the mission’s science and engineering to the public—on the side.
Ingenuity was not meant to last very long. It was designed to create helicopter flight in the thin atmosphere of Mars. He focused on five short flights over a month. Possible outcomes included a hard landing, stalling, losing power if its solar panels were covered in dust, or losing communication when it was far from the rover (this happened several times). .
But he went much further than expected, surviving three years on the Martian surface, even through three seasons of dust, and making 72 flights. The communication network that now exists in Mars has greatly contributed to its success.
Ingenuity receives instructions and transmits data to Persistence, which communicates with a fleet of satellites that includes the European ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, Nasa’s Maven spacecraft, and the Mars Exploration Orbiter. These, in turn, communicate with two deep space networks on Earth, systems of radio antennas around the world that direct and track spacecraft.
It’s taken 50 years of planetary exploration here, but already we can see the impact the Ingenuity mission will have on future exploration. The next interplanetary rotorcraft will be the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan.
It will be very different from Ingenuity. It will weigh about a ton and fly with eight rotors. It is a giant vehicle designed to fly in Titan’s thick atmosphere.
The Mars Sample Return will be one of the Red Planet’s next missions, with the aim of collecting sample containers of Martian soil for preparation and deposit by Persistence. The plan is to do this using a rover, but the success of Ingenuity led to the idea – and now the development – of a helicopter to do just that.
The future that Ingenuity has opened up for us is exciting. We’ll see helicopters on Mars and Venus, more balloons on Venus, vehicles floating under the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and maybe even an airplane or two.
This article from The Conversation is republished under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Kevin Olsen is an employee of the University of Oxford and receives funding from the UK Space Agency in support of Mars science.
