Artykuły o Perseverance, Ingenuity

[Orionid]

Perseverance lands on Mars
by Jeff Foust — February 18, 2021 [SN]
Updated 7:50 p.m. Eastern after post-landing briefing.


An illustration of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover being lowered to the surface by the "skycrane" landing system. That landing is scheduled for Feb. 18. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

WASHINGTON — NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars Feb. 18, completing a nearly seven-month journey from Earth and beginning a years-long exploration of the red planet.

Perseverance touched down at Jezero Crater on Mars at 3:55 p.m. Eastern, seven minutes after the rover, encapsulated within a heatshield and backshell, entered the Martian atmosphere. The entry, descent and landing appeared to go according to plan, punctuated with a “Touchdown confirmed!” call in mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“Wow. Just an amazing, incredible day,” NASA Acting Administrator Steve Jurczyk said at a post-landing briefing at JPL. “I could not be more proud of the team and what they’ve accomplished under challenging circumstances.”

The rover landed about 1.7 kilometers southeast of the center of the landing zone, said Allen Chen, the entry, descent and landing lead for Perseverance at JPL during the post-landing briefing. The spacecraft’s terrain relative navigation system, which matches images taken as it descends against on onboard map, helped guide the rover to a flat landing area, avoiding rocky, hazardous terrain.


The first image taken by a hazard camera, or hazcam, on the Perseverance rover after landing on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL

“We landed in an area that’s relatively rugged,” he said, showing a map with safe areas in blue and hazardous ones in red. “The system managed to find a nice blue spot in the midst of all that red, all that death that’s out there for us. We found a parking lot.”

The rover returned a pair of images from hazard cameras, or hazcams, on the front and rear of the rover. That allowed the mission team to determine the orientation of the rover, which is also on a flat surface with a tilt of only about 1.2 degrees. “Everything looks great” on the rover, said Jennifer Trosper, deputy project manager. Additional images will come back from the rover, as well as those collected during landing, over the next few days.

The rover will also start deploying equipment such as a high-gain antenna and the mast on which several instruments are mounted. “We’re excited to be opening up the rover over the next few days,” she said.

Science, sample collection and tech demos

The $2.7 billion mission, known as Mars 2020, launched July 30 of last year on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5. Now on the surface, it will operate for at least one Martian year — nearly two Earth years — and likely for far longer, barring any technical issues.

Perseverance is NASA’s fifth Mars rover, dating back to the Sojourner rover flown on the Mars Pathfinder mission that landed in 1997, and is by far the most sophisticated. While similar to size to the Curiosity rover that has been on Mars since 2012, the 1,025-kilogram Perseverance is about 100 kilograms heavier and has a payload of science instruments and technology demonstrations 50% larger.

Most of that payload will be devoted to studies of the landing site and surrounding region, looking for evidence of past Martian life. Scientists will also use the rover’s instruments to characterize the planet’s geology and climate.


Adam Steltzner (right), Perseverance chief engineer, celebrates with other members of the mission team after receiving word that the rover safely landed on Mars Feb. 18. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

A key aspect of that science mission will be to collect samples of a wide range of Martian rocks, including those that scientists believe contain biosignatures, or evidence of past life. Perseverance will cache those samples, either in selected locations on the surface or on the rover itself, to be returned to Earth by two later missions that will launch no earlier than 2026 as part of the broader Mars Sample Return campaign NASA is conducting in cooperation with the European Space Agency.

Scientists hope that either the instruments on Perseverance, or the samples brought back to Earth for analysis in terrestrial labs in the 2030s, will turn up evidence of past life. But they also acknowledge that the samples might find no evidence of such life. If that happens, “it would suggest that not all habitable environments that exist are inhabited,” said Ken Farley, Mars 2020 project scientist, at a Feb. 17 briefing. “We just can’t assume that everywhere that is habitable has had life originate and thrive in it.”

“I don’t necessarily think it would be the end of exploration on Mars and looking for life on Mars,” added Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division. “We would need to keep looking, and look harder, maybe in other places.”

Besides looking for evidence of past life, Perseverance is also a step toward future life in the form of human missions. One payload on the rover, called MOXIE, will test the ability to convert carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into oxygen for life support and propellant. The rover will also deploy a small helicopter, called Ingenuity, that will attempt the first powered flight in the Martian atmosphere. Such vehicles could serve as scouts for astronauts on future missions.

“This rover has a substantial amount of feed-forward technology on it,” said Matt Wallace, deputy project manager for Mars 2020, at a Feb. 17 webinar by the National Academies’ Space Studies Board. He worked on NASA’s four previous Mars rovers, from Sojourner to Curiosity. “This is really the first one that I think of as a human precursor mission.”

“Now that we’re on the ground,” Glaze said at the post-landing briefing, “the fun really starts.”

Source: https://spacenews.com/perseverance-lands-on-mars/

[Orionid]

The multi-decade challenge of Mars Sample Return
by Jeff Foust — February 18, 2021 [SN]
A version of this article originally appeared in the Jan. 18, 2021 issue of SpaceNews magazine.


NASA’s Perseverance rover is due to touch down Feb. 18 in Mars’ Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake and river delta which could harbor signs of fossilized microbial life. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU-BERLIN/NASA/JPL-CALTECH

This month the Martian invasion fleet arrives — the fleet of terrestrial spacecraft invading Mars, that is.

On Feb. 9, Hope, the United Arab Emirates’ first mission to Mars, entered orbit around the planet to study its atmosphere. The next day, Tianwen-1, China’s first dedicated Mars mission, arrived, entering orbit to identify a target for its lander and rover, which will attempt a landing in May.

On Feb. 18, it’s NASA’s turn. The Mars 2020 spacecraft arrives at Mars, due to land at Jezero Crater. The landing will feature the same “seven minutes of terror” as the Curiosity rover experienced in 2012, and Mars 2020’s Perseverance rover looks much like its predecessor. Its mission, though, is quite different and, in many respects, won’t end for at least a decade, when the samples it collects arrive back on Earth.

The logical next step in Mars exploration

When NASA announced in late 2012 it would fly Mars 2020, it based its decision on the planetary science decadal survey in 2011. That study ranked as its highest priority flagship-class mission a concept called Mars Astrobiology Explorer Cacher (MAX-C), a rover that would study the planet’s habitability and also collect, or cache, samples for return to Earth by later missions.

“The Mars community, in their inputs to the decadal survey, was emphatic in their view that a sample return mission is the logical next step in Mars exploration,” the survey’s final report noted.

The study acknowledged that MAX-C would be just the first step in getting those samples back to Earth. NASA would need to fly later missions to collect and return the cached samples, but those were beyond the scope of the decadal survey, which was limited to missions expected to launch between 2013 and 2022.


NASA’s Perseverance rover will store rock and soil samples in sealed tubes for future retrieval. NASA’s share of the joint retrieval missions could cost $3.8 billion to $4.4 billion. Credit: NASA/JPL-CALTECH

NASA got serious about planning for those future missions in 2017, when it announced what it called a “lean” sample return architecture. It was not that different, though, from earlier concepts, calling for two additional missions. One would land near Mars 2020 and deploy a “fetch rover” to collect the samples cached by the earlier mission. That rover would return the samples to the lander, load them into a small rocket called a Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) and launch them into orbit. A second mission, an orbiter, would collect the sample container launched by the MAV and return it to Earth.

By the time Mars 2020 launched in July, NASA had refined that architecture and also brought on board the European Space Agency, which would lead development of the orbiter mission and provide the fetch rover for the NASA-led lander. Airbus Defence and Space received an ESA contract in October for the orbiter, valued at 491 million euros ($595 million.)

When Mars 2020 launched, NASA planned to move the Mars Sample Return program into Phase A of development around September. But in August, the agency announced it would first conduct an independent review of the program. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, requested the review based on the experience with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (formerly WFIRST), which had a similar review in 2017 that identified cost and technical issues with the mission.

“The primary objectives are to make sure we’re on a good footing going forward and that we have the resources we need to execute the mission and be successful,” said Jeff Gramling, Mars Sample Return program director at NASA Headquarters, when NASA announced the study.

Proceed with caution

The independent review board (IRB) was led by David Thompson, the retired president and chief executive of Orbital ATK, with a team of engineers and scientists from both inside and outside NASA. They worked for two months on the study, which was released, along with the agency’s response, Nov. 10.

The good news for NASA was that the independent study vigorously backed Mars Sample Return. “We unanimously believe that the Mars Sample Return program should proceed,” Thompson said in a call with reporters about the study. “We think its scientific value would be extraordinarily high.”

“Full steam ahead,” added Maria Zuber, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who served on the independent review and also chairs a separate standing review board for the program.

The study, though, took issue with some of NASA’s plans for Mars Sample Return, including its schedule. The architecture NASA presented to the independent review was one sometimes called “26-26-31” by the agency: both the lander and orbiter would launch in 2026, with the samples returned in 2031.

That schedule was too aggressive for the independent panel. “The schedules required to support launches in 2026 were substantially shorter than the actual experience from recent, somewhat similar programs,” like Mars 2020 and Curiosity, Thompson said.

Under a revised schedule recommended by the panel, the lander mission would launch in 2028. The orbiter could launch in either 2027 or 2028, since its use of electric propulsion gives it the flexibility to pursue alternative trajectories. That revised schedule would delay the return of the samples until 2033.

At the same time, the study warned about delaying the missions beyond 2028. “The conditions when you arrive at Mars change dramatically over the Martian year,” explained Peter Theisinger of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a member of the IRB who previously managed the Curiosity mission.

“Launch opportunities after 2028 don’t arrive at a very attractive season,” he added, with the potential for dust storms like the one in 2018 that led to the demise of the solar-powered Opportunity rover, and other changes in the atmosphere that would complicate the landing. “A significant redesign for the early ’30s would be required, and we want to avoid doing that in the middle of the program.”

The independent panel, though, wasn’t shy about suggesting changes to the mission in this early design phase. Thompson put a particular emphasis on studies examining whether the lander mission should be split into two: one carrying the fetch rover and the other the MAV. It also recommended looking at adding a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) to the lander, or at least the lander with the MAV, to ensure sufficient power and to keep the rocket’s propulsion system from getting too cold.


Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, announcing the official name of the Mars 2020 rover last March at NASA Headquarters. Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani

There’s also the issue of cost. NASA had been reticent to discuss the cost of Mars Sample Return since it was still far from the point where NASA makes a formal cost commitment. Zurbuchen, speaking at a Mars 2020 prelaunch briefing, estimated NASA’s cost of the later phases of the program would be $2.5 billion to $3 billion, a figure that didn’t include the $2.4 billion spent on Mars 2020 or ESA’s estimated contribution of 1.5 billion euros.

Thompson said that NASA’s cost estimates at the time of the independent review were $2.9 billion to $3.3 billion at a confidence level of 50%. That was too low, especially if the launches were delayed to 2028. “We concluded the total budget, to get into the range of a 70-80% confidence level, should be increased by about a billion dollars,” he said, or to about $3.8 billion to $4.4 billion.

Balancing the portfolio

NASA welcomed the independent review board’s report but stopped short of endorsing some of its biggest recommendations, particularly on cost and schedule. “It requires bringing with us a community,” said Zurbuchen, including ESA as well as Congress, which will have to agree to any delays and additional costs. He suggested “a time scale of a year or so” before NASA makes any decision on delaying the missions or increasing the program’s budget.

That decision will be informed by studies done under Phase A of the program, which formally started Dec. 17. That will further refine the design of the missions and address some of the issues raised by the independent review.

The planetary science community, meanwhile, is nervously watching the status of Mars Sample Return and the effect it could have on other parts of the field. Increased costs could take money away from other planetary programs, as well as make it unlikely other Mars missions would fly this decade.

Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, addressed that at a town hall meeting during the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in December. “I certainly do recognize and understand that it’s critically important that we maintain the balance within the portfolio and that we continue to have funding to support the other missions throughout the solar system,” she said.

That balance will also be affected by the recommendations of the next planetary science decadal survey, currently underway and scheduled for release in March 2022. The decadal won’t attempt to prioritize Mars Sample Return against other missions, said David Smith, study director for the decadal at the National Academies, but “we are encouraged to comment on NASA’s current plans to implement the second and third phases of a Mars sample return campaign.”

The previous decadal survey anticipated that when it endorsed the MAX-C mission. “The committee has therefore taken the unusual step of recommending a plan for the coming decade that also has significant budget implications for one or even two decades beyond,” the report stated. “The committee does this intentionally and explicitly, with the realization that important multi-decade efforts like Mars Sample Return can come about only if such recommendations are made and followed.”

Making such recommendations is easy enough. Following them, as Mars Sample Return shows, can be much more challenging.

Source: https://spacenews.com/the-multi-decade-challenge-of-mars-sample-return/

[Orionid]

Helicopter and other technology demos hitch a ride on Mars 2020
by Jeff Foust — February 18, 2021


NASA plans to perform up to five flights of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars after it’s deployed from the Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

WASHINGTON — While the primary focus of the Mars 2020 mission will be the search for evidence of past Martian life, the rover mission carries several other payloads that could support future robotic and human missions to the red planet.

Perhaps the highest profile of these payloads is a small helicopter, called Ingenuity, that will attempt to make the first powered flight in the Martian atmosphere. The 1.8-kilogram helicopter, attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover, will be deployed early in the mission for flight tests.

“Mars Helicopter is a technology demonstration motivated by the potential to add an aerial dimension to space exploration,” MiMi Aung, project manager for Ingenuity at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at a Feb. 16 briefing. “It’s been fully tested as much as we can on Earth. Next, it’s time to demonstrate, prove and learn how it operates on Mars.”

After the Perseverance rover lands, it will drive to a nearby location that controllers believe is best suited for the helicopter test. It will release Ingenuity, a complex process that takes about 10 days to complete, then drive a safe distance away.

A first flight will go to an altitude of three meters, hovering for 20 seconds before landing. “It will truly be a Wright Brothers’ moment, but on another planet,” she said.

If successful, up to four more flights could follow over 30 days. Those flights, up to 90 seconds long, will go to altitudes of three to five meters and travel as much as 50 meters downrange, returning to an “airfield” landing zone 10 meters on a side.

The $85 million project, intended as a technology demonstration, has not been without controversy. Some scientists involved with Mars 2020 opposed the inclusion of the helicopter, arguing that those tests would take time away from rover operations during the initial phases of the mission. However, with the support of then NASA Administration Jim Bridenstine, the agency decided in May 2018 to fly the helicopter, later named Ingenuity, on the mission.

If successful, Ingenuity could pave the way for flying more advanced helicopters on future robotic and crewed missions, serving as scouts. “I think Ingenuity is today’s Sojourner,” said Matt Wallace, deputy project manager for Mars 2020, during a Feb. 17 briefing. Sojourner was NASA’s first Mars rover, flown on the Mars Pathfinder mission that landed in 1997.

Wallace, who worked on Sojourner, recalled there was skepticism at the time of the Mars Pathfinder mission whether a rover would be useful. “We found very quickly that having a mobile capability on the surface of Mars was incredibly valuable,” he said. “I think in almost every way, when you look at Ingenuity, it looks very much the same.”

On Perseverance itself, most of its payloads are science instruments intended to study the planet and look for evidence of past life. One, though, is a demonstration of technology for producing oxygen on Mars. The Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) Experiment, or MOXIE, will attempt to convert carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into oxygen.

Such a technology is critical for future human missions to Mars, enabling crews to produce oxygen needed for both life support and propellant. The use of ISRU technologies for propellant production in particular makes human missions much more feasible, noted Jeff Sheehy, chief engineer for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, at a Feb. 16 briefing.

MOXIE will be turned on three times in the first 30 days after landing, with the first two to test the payload. “On the third run, we’ll actually make oxygen under some conservative operating conditions,” Sheehy said. MOXIE will be run at least 10 times over the course the mission, testing its ability to produce oxygen at different times of day and seasons of the year.

Each run of MOXIE will be about an hour, producing 6 to 10 grams of oxygen. The technology would need to be scaled up by about a factor of 200 for use on future crewed missions, but the agency hopes to at least prove the technology works on this mission.

The experiment did face a number of development changes that raised questions about whether it could be flown on Mars 2020. “There were times where some of the managers worried that the technology couldn’t be developed in time to get it on the rover,” he said. “There’s no question that the team that designed, built and tested MOXIE needed a lot of moxie to overcome all the challenges that were encountered along the way.”

Another instrument, SuperCam, features a laser that will be used to zap rocks, allowing it to analyze its chemical composition. An additional aspect of that instrument is a microphone that will listen as the laser fires, which can give scientists clues to the hardness and other properties of the rocks.

The microphone will have other applications as well. “It will listen to the wind, listen to the rover and also the infrared laser,” Sylvestre Maurice, deputy principal investigator for SuperCam, at a Feb. 16 briefing. “It’s the first time that we’ll have a microphone on Mars.”

The microphone, he said, will allow scientists to study atmospheric turbulence by listening to the wind. In the tenuous atmosphere of Mars, sound propagates differently from Earth, doing so at slower speeds and supporting lower frequencies better than higher ones. The microphone can also provide diagnostic information about the rover itself. “It’s opening a new world,” Maurice said.

Source: https://spacenews.com/helicopter-and-other-technology-demos-hitch-a-ride-on-mars-2020/

[Orionid]

Perseverance makes its first drive on Mars
by Jeff Foust — March 6, 2021 [SN]


The Perseverance Mars rover took this image of tracks it made after its first drive on the Martian surface March 4. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

WASHINGTON — NASA’s Perseverance rover has started moving on the Martian surface as project scientists prepare to send the rover toward the remnants of a river delta in search of signs of past life.

At a March 5 press briefing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, project officials said that the rover made its first movements since landing in Jezero Crater Feb. 18. The rover moved forward four meters, turned 150 degrees to the left, and then went back 2.5 meters.

“Our first drive went incredibly well,” said Anais Zarifian, Perseverance mobility test bed engineer, at the briefing. During the drive, the rover took images that showed the tracks left by its wheels. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see wheel tracks.”

That first drive by the rover is part of ongoing checkouts of the rover and its suite of instruments. “We haven’t had any hardware issues. Everything has been working that we’ve been checking out,” said Robert Hogg, Perseverance deputy mission manager, at the briefing. “It’s actually been amazingly smooth.”

As engineers test the rover’s systems, scientists are planning the rover’s trek to a delta that is a high priority region for the rover to explore. Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance deputy project scientist, said at the briefing that they’ve mapped two potential paths from the landing site — which the mission has named Octavia E. Butler Landing after the science-fiction author — to the base of the delta.

“We’re right in the middle of conversations” with rover planners on the best route and how long it will take to get to the delta, she said. That includes weighing the terrain against science that can be done along the way: while one route is relatively smooth, it’s less scientifically interesting than the other route goes past some deposits that offer a preview of the delta.

That trip to the delta will take place after Perseverance deploys Ingenuity, the small helicopter attached to the rover’s undercarriage, and observes a series of flight tests Ingenuity performs scheduled to last 30 days. Hogg said engineers are still scouting for a location to perform those flight tests, using images from the rover.

“We’re still analyzing various areas to determine the best place to do that,” he said. “We hope to get the whole helicopter thing going before spring is over.” Once the flight tests are done, the rover will head toward the delta.

Engineers continue to test some of the rover’s systems, including those that will be used to collect samples. Hogg said commissioning of the sample collection system will be completed after the helicopter tests.

One of the primary goals of the Mars 2020 mission is to cache samples for later return to Earth. With Perseverance safely on the surface, NASA is moving ahead with aspects of future missions needed to return those samples. On March 4, NASA awarded Northrop Grumman a contract worth up to $84.5 million to provide the propulsion for the rocket, called the Mars Ascent Vehicle, that will carry the samples from the surface into Mars orbit. That vehicle will be flown to Mars on a lander mission scheduled for launch no earlier than 2026.

“We’ve been thinking on the science team about notional samples to collect in Jezero Crater for years now, and thinking about the potential for Mars sample return,” Stack Morgan said. Now, she said, they can see the actual rocks they may sample through the eyes of the rover. “We’re talking about real rocks now, and that’s so exciting for us on the science team.”

“This is one for the ages for JPL and NASA. We’ve been talking about this for decades,” Hogg said, even though it will still be at least a decade before those samples are back on Earth. “Even though it seems like a long time away, it’s going to pass in a blink of an eye.”

Source: https://spacenews.com/perseverance-makes-its-first-drive-on-mars/

[Orionid]

Ingenuity helicopter prepares for first flight on Mars
by Jeff Foust — March 23, 2021


An illustration of the Ingenuity helicopter in flight on Mars, observed by the Perseverance rover. Flight tests of Ingenuity are scheduled to begin in early April and last one month. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

WASHINGTON — A small helicopter that hitched a ride on NASA’s Perseverance rover will attempt its first flight on Mars in early April, demonstrating technology that could be used on future missions.

At a March 23 briefing, NASA officials discussed plans to perform the first flights of Ingenuity, a 1.8-kilogram helicopter currently attached to the underside of Perseverance. On March 21, spacecraft controllers started the process of deploying Ingenuity by jettisoning a cover that protected the vehicle during flight.

Perseverance is in the process of driving to an “airfield,” a flat area 10 by 10 meters. Over the course of 10 days, the spacecraft will perform a series of deployments to unfold Ingenuity and drop it on the surface. “That’s a very prescribed and meticulous process,” said Farah Alibay, Perseverance integration lead for Ingenuity at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, involving separating a sequence of attachments, all documented using cameras on the rover.

The rover will drive away and, once Ingenuity’s solar panel charges up its battery, it will be ready for its first flight. “The first flight is special. It’s by far the most important flight that we plan to do,” said Håvard Grip, Ingenuity chief pilot. “It will be the first powered flight by an aircraft on another planet.”

On that flight, tentatively scheduled for April 8, Ingenuity will take off and climb to an altitude of three meters. It will then hover in place for 30 seconds while turning, then land. Project officials call that flight a “Wright Brothers moment” and, to demonstrate that connection, included a swatch of fabric, the size of a postage stamp, from the original Wright Brothers’ Flyer on Ingenuity.

If that first flight is successful, the project will attempt up to four more over the next month of increasing duration. Ingenuity can fly for up to 90 seconds at a time, with plans to go to altitudes of about five meters and travel as much as 50 meters downrange and back.

Ingenuity was extensively tested on the ground, including flight tests in vacuum chambers to simulate Martian atmospheric conditions, but project officials said those demonstrations could not test everything. “The biggest challenge will be that we are flying in the atmosphere of Mars, which has its own dynamics, its own winds, wind gusts and so forth,” said J. (Bob) Balaram, Ingenuity chief engineer. “There’s nothing that beats actually being in the real environment of Mars.”

The $85 million Ingenuity is solely a technology demonstration. Even if the helicopter performs its series of flights flawlessly, there are no plans to extend the mission beyond the 31 days allocated for flights. That’s because NASA wants Perseverance, which will observe the flights from a safe distance, to move ahead with its primary science mission.

“It’s the month of Ingenuity,” said Bobby Braun, director for planetary science at JPL. “We also have a science mission to conduct, a very important science mission that’s going to gather the samples that will eventually come back to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign. So, that month is our window to conduct the technology demonstration experiment, and we’re confident that we can do so.”

There are no firm plans to send helicopters like Ingenuity to Mars on future missions, but Braun argued that a successful demonstration might be analogous to Sojourner, the small rover that was part of the Mars Pathfinder lander mission in 1997. “Sojourner demonstrated the value of surface mobility,” he said. “In the same spirit, I can only imagine where we may be a decade or so from now.”

NASA is already pursuing another mission that will fly through the atmosphere of another world. Dragonfly will go to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and fly like a drone in its dense atmosphere to hop from one location to another. Balaram said the project has been in discussions with the Dragonfly on topics like development of a test program.

“It’s going to be really interesting to see how this kind of capability will scale up,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division. “What we learn from this experiment will definitely feed forward.”

Source: https://spacenews.com/ingenuity-helicopter-prepares-for-first-flight-on-mars/

[Orionid]

NASA primed for historic flight of experimental Mars helicopter
March 26, 2021 Stephen Clark [SFN]


An artist’s illustration of the Ingenuity Helicopter flying on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Perseverance rover will soon release a small rotorcraft onto the surface of Mars and drive a safe distance away to observe a series of historic test flights in the ultra-thin Martian atmosphere, which could begin around April 8, officials said this week.

The Mars Helicopter, named Ingenuity, has been stowed underneath the deck of the Perseverance rover for nearly one year. Ground crews at the Kennedy Space Center installed the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) rotorcraft onto the belly of the rover April 6, 2020, during preparations for Perseverance’s launch last July.

Controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are now preparing to send commands to release the Ingenuity helicopter. The rover released a debris cover March 21 to reveal the helicopter. The carbon-fiber shield protected Ingenuity from rocks and dust kicked up during the rover’s landing on Mars on Feb. 18.

The rotorcraft was a relatively late addition to Perseverance’s mission. NASA approved the helicopter technology demonstration to fly to Mars with the Perseverance rover in 2018, just two years before launch.

NASA spent $80 million developing and building the helicopter, which will stand about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) tall and has counter-rotating rotors that will span about 4 feet (1.2 meters) tip-to-tip. Another $5 million is devoted to operating the helicopter during a 31-day test campaign, which officially begins when Perseverance releases Ingenuity in the coming days.

Ingenuity’s test flight is scheduled for around April 8, but that date could change as the helicopter goes through its deployment and testing milestones, according to Bob Balaram, helicopoter’s chief engineer at JPL.

The helicopter’s first hop is designed to reach an altitude of about 10 feet, or 3 meters. Ingenuity will hover in place for about 30 seconds, then make a turn while it’s hovering before descending back to the surface of Mars.

“The first flight is special,” said Håvard Grip, Ingenuity’s chief pilot at JPL, during a press conference Tuesday. “It’s by far the most important flight that we plan to do. It will be the first powered flight by an aircraft on another planet.”

Bobby Braun, director of planetary science at JPL, said the helicopter and its support team back on Earth will attempt to produce a “Wright brothers’ moment” on another world.

Recognizing Ingenuity’s flight as another aviation first, NASA installed a postage stamp-size piece of fabric from the Wright brothers’ first aircraft, known as the Flyer, onto the Mars helicopter. The fabric covered one of the aircraft’s wings during its first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on Dec. 17, 1903.

Another piece of fabric and a fragment of spruce wood from the Wright Flyer flew to the moon on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. While the Wright brothers used fabric and wood for their aircraft, Ingenuity is made of carbon-fiber skins and “exotic metals,” Balaram said.

“This is, in effect, an aircraft that also happens to be a spacecraft,” Balaram said. “It has survived launch. It has survived the journey through space, the vacuum and radiation, it has survived the entry, descent and landing onto the surface on the bottom of the Perseverance rover, and it has survived all the challenges and design issues that are necessary for a spacecraft.

“But most of all I think of Ingenuity also as an experimental aircraft,” he said.

The surface pressure of the Martian atmosphere is about 1% that of Earth’s, meaning Ingenuity’s rotors will have to generate extra lift to allow the helicopter to take off. The Mars helicopter’s rotors will spin about five-to-ten times faster than a typical helicopter flying in Earth’s atmosphere.

Lori Glaze, head of NASA’s planetary science division, described the Ingenuity helicopter as a “high-risk, high-reward” experiment that could pave the way for future aerial vehicles to explore Mars and other planets.

Before it can attempt to make history, the helicopter will through a series of deployment and checkout steps. It will take about six days to fully release the rotorcraft from the rover, first releasing a launch lock that kept Ingenuity firmly attached to the rover during the trip to Mars.

Then a pyrotechnic device will cut a table to allow Ingenuity to begin rotating out of its horizontal position, and the helicopter will extend two of its four landing legs. By the third day, an electric motor will fully rotate Ingenuity into a vertical orientation underneath the rover, and the other two landing legs will unfurl into position on the fourth day of the helicopter’s deployment sequence, according to NASA.

At that point, the helicopter will remain attached to the rover by a single bolt and a couple of tiny electrical connectors, NASA said.


The debris shield, a protective covering on the bottom of NASA’s Perseverance rover, was released on March 21. The debris shield protected the agency’s Ingenuity helicopter during landing, and its removal allows NASA to proceed with deployment of the helicopter on the surface of Mars. This image was taken by a camera on the end of the Perseverance rover’s robotic arm. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

NASA says a wide angle camera at the end of the rover’s robotic arm will take pictures of Ingenuity throughout the sequence to confirm everything looks good.

On the day before Perseverance releases the helicopter, the Ingenuity team at JPL will fully charge the rotorcraft’s six battery cells using electricity from the rover’s plutonium power source. Then the rover will sever its connection to the helicopter to drop about 5 inches (13 centimeters) down to the Martian surface.

“Then there will the deposition of the helicopter on the surface, and then there will be that first exposure to sunlight where we have to charge the batteries by ourselves,” Balaram said. “We are no longer part of the Perseverance rover and connected safely and we are completely on our own, fully autonomous, waiting to receive commands.

Once Ingenuity is on the ground, the Perseverance begin driving away from the helicopter. Its destination will be an observation point at least 200 feet, or 60 meters, away from Ingenuity’s flight zone, which itself is about the length of a football field. The flight zone includes an airfield, a 33-by-33-foot (10-by-10-meter) area where the helicopter will take off and land.

Ground teams selected the location for the airfield with the help of imagery from Perseverance’s cameras, which surveyed the landscape at its landing site at Jezero Crater over the last month. The region chosen for the test flights is flat, with few rocks or obstacles that could pose a threat to the helicopter.

There will be a bit of drama after the rover releases the helicopter onto the surface.

Ingenuity’s batteries can power the helicopter and keep its internal electronics warm for about 25 hours before they need recharged. The rover will be shading Ingenuity’s solar panels after it releases the aircraft, so it will have to drive away within a day to allow sunlight to illuminate the helicopter, according to Farah Alibay, an engineer who oversees Perseverance’s integration with the Ingenuity helicopter.


NASA’s Perseverance rover captured this view of the Ingenuity helicopter’s “airfield” in Jezero Crater. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“We will go through a number of days of commissioning, approximately a week, where we test out sensors, we test out solar mechanisms, we test the motors to make sure they spin right, and we will be very methodical and even driven as this engineering experiment unfolds,” Balaram said. “And then we will be at a point where we will undertake our first flight and then we will progressively undertake more aggressive flights once we understand and analyze all the behaviors on that first flight.”

Ingenuity’s counter-rotating rotors will spin up to 2,537 rpm — more than 40 times per second — while the helicopter remains on the ground, a final test before engineers commit the aircraft to flight.

“Our current best estimate of when the (first) flight could happen is no earlier than about April 8, but things are fluid,” Balaram said. “We are very event and experiment driven, so that could be changed by a few days in either direction, but the best guess that we have right now is about April 8.”

Mars is currently about 159 million miles, or 259 million kilometers, from Earth. It takes communications signals about 14 minutes make a one-way trip between the planets, eliminating any chance for ground teams to fly Ingenuity in real-time.

Instead, engineers will uplink commands for each of the helicopter’s flights, and Ingenuity will autonomously take off and land, using a vision-based navigation system to help guide its flights.

Engineers tested the helicopter in a low-pressure chamber at JPL, which simulates the atmospheric conditions on Mars.

Before committing the helicopter to flight, engineers will assess wind conditions and other weather parameters, such as atmospheric density, to maximize the chances of success. Controllers at JPL can adjust the rotor speed to best match the atmospheric conditions on the day of each flight.

“I think the biggest challenge will be that we are are flying in the atmosphere of Mars, which has its own dynamics, its own winds, with gusts and so forth,” Balaram said. “These are things which we tested with wind tunnels in our chamber. We have some confidence that everything will be good, but there’s nothing that beats actually being in the real environment of Mars to see how well the … aerodynamics actually work out.”

Balaram said there are also challenges related to surviving the cold Martian nights, when temperatures dip well below zero.

“It’s difficult to keep a small system warm through the night. So just to see how well that thermal system protects us through the night, how well does the solar panel work?” he said. “There are a number of engineering aspects before you even get to the flight. But when it comes to the actual flying, it’s really the winds and the dynamics of how that all interacts with the helicopter that will be most interesting for us to learn.”

Assuming the first flight goes well, Ingenuity could fly up to four more times, reaching a higher altitude of about 16 feet (5 meters) and traversing downrange along the pre-selected flight zone, before returning to its “helipad” for landing.

The 16-foot limit for Ingenuity’s flights is largely driven by the performance limitations of a laser rangefinder on-board that measures the helicopter’s distance to the ground, according to Grip.

“We’re focusing on demonstrating basic capability to hover and then traversing and going longer distances, where we go down the flight zone and back again,” Grip said. “And then if we get past those, we will assess did we meet all tho objectives during those flights, do we want to back and retry some of those things, or if everything goes really well, then we might try to stretch our capabilities.”

NASA has set aside just one month for Ingenuity’s test flights because the $2.4 billion Perseverance mission needs to get moving in pursuit of its own higher-priority scientific objectives. The rover is designed to collect rock samples for return to Earth by a future mission set to arrive at Mars in the late 2020s.

Scientists back on Earth will analyze the specimens and search for signs of ancient Martian life.

“Ingenuity is a limited time project,” Glaze said. “It will have 31 Earth days to attempt to be the first helicopter to fly on another planet. It isn’t intended to collect science, but because its mission is so focused, it is, at its core, innovative.”

NASA’s first Mars rover, named Sojourner, landed on the Red Planet in 1997 and proved the usefulness of surface mobility in exploring other worlds.

“Sojourner redefined what we thought was possible on the surface of Mars and completely transformed our approach to how we explore it,” Glaze said. “That small rover enabled all the missions to follow, and now Perseverance — the size of a small car — is able to carry other technology demonstrations, like Ingenuity, which will further expand our horizons.”

Future rotorcraft could be dispatched to other planets with more sophisticated scientific instruments.

NASA has selected a robotic mission named Dragonfly to explore Saturn’s largest moon Titan. But Titan has a much thicker atmosphere than Mars, which eases the difficulty of rotor-driven flight.

“If we can scout and scientifically survey Mars from the air with a thin atmosphere, we can certainly do the same in a number of other destinations across the solar system, like Titan or Venus,” Braun said.

Airborne drones could survey regions on other planets not reachable by rovers driving on the ground.

“The future of powered flight in space exploration is solid and strong,” Braun said.

Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/03/26/nasa-primed-for-historic-flight-of-experimental-mars-helicopter/

[Orionid]

Mars rover deploys Ingenuity helicopter for historic flight
April 4, 2021 Stephen Clark [SFN]


This camera view from the Perseverance rover shows the Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Perseverance rover released the Ingenuity helicopter onto the surface of Mars Saturday, leaving behind the experimental flying drone to survive on its own power until attempting a historic hop in the Red Planet’s thin carbon dioxide atmosphere.

The milestone kicks off a week of checkouts and testing before NASA commits to the $80 million Ingenuity helicopter’s first test flight, currently targeted for April 11.

NASA officials confirmed rover deposited the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) helicopter on the ground Saturday. Imagery from one of the Perseverance rover’s hazar cameras showed Ingenuity standing upright on the planet’s surface.

The six-wheeled rover needed to drive away from the helicopter within 25 hours to ensure sunlight could begin charging the rotorcraft’s six lithium-ion batteries. Based on the hazard camera view from Perseverance, the Ingenuity helicopter appeared to be basking in sunlight after its deployment, with the afternoon sun casting a shadow on Mars’s rust-colored soil.

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The Ingenuity helicopter has been attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover for nearly one year. Technicians working inside a clean room at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center attached the rotorcraft to the rover April 6, 2020, a few months before the mission blasted off from Cape Canaveral aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket July 30.

A debris shield protected the helicopter during the rover’s landing on Mars on Feb. 18. Last month, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, uplinked commands to jettison the debris shield in preparation for the helicopter’s release.

Over the last week, ground teams stepped through a choreographed sequence of commands to first release a lock that held the helicopter firmly against the belly of the rover in a horizontal position. Then the helicopter rotated to a roughly 45-degree angle, and two of the craft’s four carbon composite legs extended.

Last week, the helicopter moved into a vertical orientation and the other two landing legs unfurled. That left just a tiny bolt and some electrical connectors linking the rover with the helicopter.

Those electrical wires allowed the rover’s nuclear battery to charge up the helicopter’s batteries to full capacity.

“That’s a good thing, because Ingenuity has to run its own heater from its own battery after the drop. No more free power from the rover!” wrote Bob Balaram, the helicopter’s chief engineer at JPL, in a blog post Friday.

Before the helicopter dropped off the belly of the rover, Perseverance powered a heater that kept the rotorcraft’s internal electronics at about 45 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius). Temperatures at Perseverance landing site inside Jezero Crater can drop as low as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius).


Artist’s illustration of NASA’s Perseverance rover and Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Ingenuity is now on its own, and it doesn’t have the same robust plutonium power source as Perseverance. The helicopter’s tiny batteries will power a heater set to keep the craft’s internal electronics at about 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 15 degrees Celsius), according to Balaram.

“Then it’s off to survive the first night on its own!” Balaram wrote. “The Ingenuity team will be anxiously waiting to hear from the helicopter the next day. Did it make it through the night? Is the solar panel working as expected?

“The team will check the temperatures and the battery recharge performance over the next couple of days,” Balaram wrote. “If it all looks good, then it’s onto the next steps: unlocking the rotor blades, and testing out all the motors and sensors.”

NASA said Wednesday that Ingenuity’s first flight is now targeted for no earlier than April 11, with data confirming the outcome of the hop expected back on Earth the next day.

Perseverance will head for an observation location at least 200 feet, or 60 meters, away from Ingenuity’s flight zone, which itself is about the length of a football field. The flight zone includes an airfield, a 33-by-33-foot (10-by-10-meter) area where the helicopter will take off and land.

Engineers used imagery from Perseverance’s cameras to select the site for the airfield, an area free of large boulders and steep slopes.

The Ingenuity helicopter is a technology demonstration, and the autonomous test flights will come with risks. NASA wants to ensure the Perseverance rover is a safe distance away from the rotorcraft when it takes off.

Ingenuity’s counter-rotating carbon-fiber rotor blades span about 4 feet (1.2 meters) tip-to-tip, and the blades will spin up to 2,537 rpm — more than 40 times per second — while the helicopter remains on the ground, a final test before engineers commit the aircraft to flight.

Engineers plan up to five test flights, starting with an ascent to an altitude of about 10 feet (3 meters), where the craft will hover for about 30 seconds before making a turn and landing back where it took off. Further test flights will reach a maximum altitude of about 16 feet (5 meters), and introduce forward motion to carry the helicopter down the flight zone and back to its takeoff location.

Using a wireless transmitter and receiver, the Perseverance rover will relay commands and data between ground controllers on Earth and the Ingenuity helicopter.

NASA has set aside one month for the Ingenuity helicopter’s demonstration flights, and that clock started when Perseverance released the rotorcraft onto the surface of Mars. The airborne drone will attempt to fly in an atmosphere just 1% the thickness of Earth’s. To do that, the helicopter’s rotors will spin five-to-ten times faster than a typical helicopter flying in Earth’s atmosphere.

Ingenuity does not carry any scientific instruments. It has black-and-white and color cameras to assist in autonomous navigation and gather aerial imagery of the Perseverance rover’s landing site at Jezero Crater, which harbored a lake of liquid water more than 3 billion years ago.

The helicopter will be operating on its own on each of its flights. The one-way travel time for radio signals between Earth and Mars is currently more than 14 minutes.

If the experiment works, Ingenuity could pave the way for future aerial explorers to fly around other planets. NASA is already developing a rotorcraft to fly around Saturn’s moon Titan, which has an atmosphere denser than Earth’s.

After the 31-day helicopter test campaign, the Perseverance rover will continue on in pursuit of its primary goal to identify, collect, and seal rock samples for return to Earth by a future mission.

Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/04/mars-rover-deploys-ingenuity-helicopter-for-historic-flight/

[Orionid]

NASA reschedules Ingenuity first flight
by Jeff Foust — April 18, 2021 [SN]


Ingenuity will attempt its first powered flight on Mars early April 19 after engineers developed a workaround for a timer issue that delayed the flight a week ago. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

WASHINGTON — NASA now plans to attempt a first flight of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity early April 19 after finding a workaround to a software problem that delayed the flight earlier this month.

Source: https://spacenews.com/nasa-reschedules-ingenuity-first-flight/

[Orionid]

NASA schedules first Mars helicopter test flight for Monday
April 18, 2021 Stephen Clark [SFN]

After some long-distance troubleshooting, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter will attempt the first flight of its kind on another world Monday in a demonstration that could open the door to a new era of interplanetary aerial scouts.

Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/18/nasa-schedules-first-mars-helicopter-test-flight-for-monday/

[Orionid]

Ingenuity performs first flight on Mars
by Jeff Foust — April 19, 2021 [SN]


An image taken by NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter during its first flight April 19, looking down at the surface and its shadow. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

WASHINGTON — NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter successfully performed the first powered flight on another planet April 19, briefing hovering above the surface of Mars.

The 1.8-kilogram helicopter performed the flight at 3:34 a.m. Eastern, but data from the flight, relayed through the Perseverance rover and another Mars orbiter, arrived at Earth a little more than three hours later.

Source: https://spacenews.com/ingenuity-performs-first-flight-on-mars/

[Orionid]

After successful first flight, NASA wants to push Mars helicopter to its limits
April 19, 2021 Stephen Clark [SFN]

Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/19/after-successful-first-flight-nasa-wants-to-push-mars-helicopter-to-its-limits/

[Orionid]

NASA celebrates first historic helicopter flight on Mars
April 19, 2021 Stephen Clark [SFN]


A navigation camera on NASA’s Perseverance rover captured this view of the Ingenuity helicopter’s historic flight Monday. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

An automated mini-helicopter driven by two fast-spinning, counter-rotating rotors took off from the surface of Mars, hovered for 30 seconds, then successfully landed Monday to complete the historic first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet.

Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/19/nasa-celebrates-first-historic-helicopter-flight-on-mars/

[Orionid]

Ingenuity success opens door for future Mars helicopter missions
by Jeff Foust — April 20, 2021 [SN]

WASHINGTON — The successful flight of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars paves the way for its use on future missions, agency officials said, but exactly when and how remain to be determined.

Source: https://spacenews.com/ingenuity-success-opens-door-for-future-mars-helicopter-missions/

[Orionid]

Ingenuity makes second flight on Mars
by Jeff Foust — April 22, 2021 [SN]


An image of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter in flight April 22, seen by the Mastcam-Z camera on the nearby Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

ORLANDO — NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter successfully made its second flight on Mars April 22, expanding its flight envelope as the project considers more ambitious tests in the coming days.

Source: https://spacenews.com/ingenuity-makes-second-flight-on-mars/

[Orionid]

In another first, NASA’s Perseverance rover generates oxygen on Mars
April 22, 2021 Stephen Clark [SFN]


This view from the Perseverance rover’s navigation cameras shows the “Mars 2020” and “Perseverance” name plates on the vehicle’s robotic arm. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In another first, an instrument inside NASA’s Perseverance rover has made oxygen out of carbon dioxide sucked in from the atmosphere of Mars, officials said Wednesday. The technology could help future astronauts “live off the land” by generating their own rocket fuel and breathing air.

Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/22/in-another-first-nasas-perseverance-rover-generates-oxygen-on-mars/