Insinyur di Aeronautics and Space Administration (National Aeronautics and Space Administration / NASA) plans to send miniature helicopters to fly over the surface of Mars next month in an interplanetary flight experiment. If successful, the mission will be the first aircraft controlled and powered flight on another celestial body.
Reported Reuters, NASA compared the debut of the Mars spacecraft, named Ingenuity, with the first flight of a motorized aircraft made by Wright Brothers near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. Ingenuity uses solar power and weighs 1.8 kilograms.
In honor of this feat, a small piece of wing cloth from the original Wright Brothers aircraft was strapped to the helicopter’s solar panels and hovered in Ingenuity, while flying about 150 million miles from Earth.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles, where Ingenuity was designed and built, aim to launch a four-legged dual-rotor helicopter for the inaugural test flight around April 8.
Last month, the helicopter was brought to the red planet by placing it in the stomach of Perseverance, NASA’s Mars probe. Perseverance landed at the bottom of a vast basin called the Jezero Crater on February 18 after seven months of traveling through space.
Perseverance, a wheeled robotic laboratory, aims to find fossilized traces of microbial life on Mars in the past, and collect rock specimens to return to Earth during future Mars missions.
One of its first missions is to transport Ingenuity to its test flight area, which is located on a flat area near the Perseverance landing site. At that location, Ingenuity will be lowered by remote control and placed on the ground before the cruiser vehicle leaves the location carefully.
NASA has set aside 30 Mars days to dismantle and prepare the helicopter for a historic yet modest flight. The plane will take off, slowly vertically until it reaches a height of 10 feet (3 meters), hover for 30 seconds, spin in the air, then descend for a smooth landing.
JPL plans to use a camera installed in Perseverance parked nearby to capture the entire activity and then send the images back to Earth in a few hours. Intelligence is also equipped with two independent cameras for navigation. [na/ft]
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