NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter Defies Odds and Continues to Soar on Mars

On April 2, Ingenuity soared 52 feet into the Martian sky—the highest record for a drone—to capture a suborbital image of the Martian landscape.

After landing, it disappeared. When the scientists try to upload instructions for the next flight, Ingenuity’s radio tag disappears.

Scientists finally found Ingenuity after six days of searching, when the helicopter’s Mars companion, a determined rover, reached a ridge and approached where it landed.

NASA engineer Travis Browne described the episode in a posting blog Last week, we gave a dramatic look at the agency’s exploration of Mars, and the incredible resilience of the Ingenuity helicopter. Its resilience continues to surprise NASA two years after scientists predicted the small plane would crash.

The helicopter is flying again, Ingenuity team leader Teddy Zanetos told The Washington Post, and its longevity has inspired the team to include a model helicopter in it on future missions to Mars – a testament to how powerful Ingenuity has proven itself.

“Absolutely ridiculous,” said Zanetos. “This is a once in a lifetime thing.”

Creativity defies odds on the day it first lifts off from Martian soil. The four-pound craft is about 19 inches tall and little more than an avionics box with four long legs at one end and two rotating blades and a solar panel at the other. But it made its first powered flight to another planet — what NASA calls a “Wright Brothers moment” — after arriving on Mars in April 2021.

NASA flies a helicopter on Mars, marking the first time a plane has flown on another planet

However, the creation was never intended to be a proof of concept worth over $80 million. It’s called a trip to Mars with Perseverance, an SUV-sized rover that will go on NASA missions meant to study Martian soil.

Ingenuity, controlled by radio signals emitted from Perseverance, completed its five flight mission—a series of simple demonstrations that the helicopter design would work in the thin Martian atmosphere—in May 2021. The Tzanetos team then received approval to continue flying.

“At this point, we are losing time,” said Zanetos. “No mechanism is designed to last much longer than that.”

Somehow, they did – for months on end, and dozens more flights. In May 2022, it seems that the story of Magic Creation will finally collapse to Earth (Mars). winter At first, NASA was concerned that the low temperatures could cause Ingenuity’s solar-powered batteries to malfunction, or even freeze overnight.

The helicopter entered a reduced power state after its 28th flight at the end of April that year, and scientists told The Post they weren’t sure if it would ever fly again.

NASA’s Mars Helicopter should have flown it five times. Move 28.

Amazingly, the sensitive part of creativity survived the Martian cold. But Zanetos said NASA still faces the challenge of reconnecting the helicopter every time its components freeze. The creative team used data from sunrises on Mars to calculate when each morning the helicopter would melt down and regain enough power to power it up.

Results? A type of game of hide and seek, where NASA sends Ingenuity on a flight, then uses its model to calculate when the helicopter will come back online to receive its next instructions. That’s enough to get Creativity and his rogue mission team through the Martian winter.

“We still need to play some of these games every once in a while, depending on how cold or windy it gets,” said Zanetos. “But the team has been very good at that.”

NASA got into an even more tense game of hide and seek with Ingenuity in April after Flight 49, escorting a Perseverance helicopter through rough terrain thought to be an ancient river delta.

Team members don’t worry when they are Brown wrote that he failed to contact the helicopter for the first few days after the flight; Their process sometimes takes several days to find its ingenuity. But their fears increased after nearly a week had passed. Zanetos wondered if the brave chopper had finally run out of luck.

“everyone [day] Tzanitos says “blessing” for creativity. “You are always ready for the end of the work.”

Finally, six days after Mars lost contact with Creation, the team detected a “lonely, lonely” radio signal, Brown wrote. The next day, another signal came – confirmation that creativity lives on. The team ultimately concluded that the hillside had prevented helicopter signals from reaching the rover.

Creativity flew again for the 50th time on April 13, climbing nearly 59 feet to once again break the altitude record.

Tzanitos said the team will continue to push the boundaries of creativity. While Perseverance continues its mission of collecting Martian soil samples, Ingenuity is free to roam the skies ahead of explorers as an explorer, gathering valuable data on the Red Planet and appearing as the first Mars explorer.

And maybe creativity will not be the last. In 2028, NASA plans to send the plane test to Mars to retrieve samples collected by Perseverance. Then craft launch off Mars – the agency’s newest astronomer – and return samples to Earth for study.

This task has been redesigned, says Zanettos, after the success of Ingenuity. NASA now plans to ship Two helicopters From a nearly identical design to the probe as a backup to take Perseverance samples in the event the probe is out of service by the time it arrives in 2030.

Creativity is impossible to continue at that time. But for now, the brave chopper refuses to die.

“Two years ago, if you had asked me what I expected from Creativity, I would have said, ‘Well, I hope our children or grandchildren can build this,’” says Zanetos. “… Here it is, Creativity is still flying , and we are designing the second generation .”