Tiny Mars helicopter to pay homage to Wright brothers

Andrea Leinfelder ,  Staff writer March 23, 2021 Updated: March 23, 2021 2:43 p.m. Comments

Andrea Leinfelder

This artist illustration depicts Mars Helicopter Ingenuity during a test flight on the Red Planet. Ingenuity reached the planet on Feb. 18, 2021, strapped to the belly of the Perseverance rover (seen in the background). The helicopter's first flight could be in April.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, poised to take the first powered flight on Mars as soon as April 8, is carrying a small piece of aviation history.

Underneath the helicopter's solar panel is a stamp-sized piece of fabric.  It was a part of the wing covering on the Wright brothers’ aircraft that took the first powered, controlled flight on Earth on Dec. 17, 1903.

“We are very proud to honor that experimental aircraft,” Bob Balaram, Ingenuity's chief engineer, said Tuesday during a news conference.

Ingenuity is a 4-pound helicopter that hitched a ride to Mars on the belly of NASA's Perseverance rover. The rover reached the Martian surface on Feb. 18. Its primary mission is to search Mars for signs of past microbial life and to collect rock samples that future missions could return to Earth.

But before starting this mission in earnest, NASA is preparing  for the "month of Ingenuity."

Once disconnected from the rover, the helicopter will have 31 Earth days to conduct test flights. Ingenuity is an $80 million technology demonstration. It's a high-risk, high-reward program designed to test technologies that could be advanced in the future, said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division.

"Ingenuity will open new possibilities and will spark questions for the future about what we could accomplish with an aerial explorer," Glaze said during the news conference. "Could we image areas not visible from space or that a rover couldn't reach, like shadowy craters with seasonal water flow? Could a helicopter scout ahead for rovers and help plot the most efficient course for the best science? Could we support future human missions with aerial capabilities?"

NASA has chosen an "airfield" just north of where the rover landed. It used images from satellites and from Perseverance to look at and measure every rock and pebble of the 33-by-33-foot airfield to ensure it was sufficiently flat and lacked obstructions.

The first flight will lift the helicopter about 10 feet off the surface. It will hover, turning in place, for about 30 seconds and then land.

While flying, Ingenuity will take images of the ground (about 30 images a second) to track features on the planet's surface and see how it's moving. It will combine this with other sensor measurements to make tiny adjustments to its controls (doing this 500 times a second) that should keep it on the trajectory NASA gives it, according to Håvard Grip, Ingenuity's chief pilot.

If this first flight is a success, subsequent flights could go up to 16 feet. Ingenuity could attempt up to five test flights.

The Perseverance rover will be watching from a nearby spot -- named the Van Zyl Overlook for Jakob van Zyl, a long-time employee at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was working on Ingenuity before he died unexpectedly last year --  attempting to capture the helicopter's first flight.

"I'm going to warn you it's hard. Space is hard," Farah Alibay, Perseverance integration lead for Ingenuity, said during the news conference. "And in this case, we have two missions that have their own separate clocks, and we've got to get that timing right to get that first flight. We're trying very, very hard to catch that."

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