Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Is Preparing For Its Longest Flight Yet

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NASA’s Mars MARS helicopter made the 24th flight recently, on Sunday April 3, but now it is ready for a period of running with the 25th flight, which will be the longest flight until now (via JPL). Originally designed only for five flights, the helicopter has been very successful so that it has now been in charge of helping the rover perseverance by looking for driving routes and looking for the target of scientific interest (via JPL).

Perseverance is heading for the Jezero crater area which is an ancient River Delta site, where water is abundant billions of years ago and where microscopic life can be formed. Rover will look for an area for this ancient life evidence, but to help him, the helicopter needs to travel from the current location, the Séítah region, to Delta. To do that, the helicopter first needs to take a short flight to 24 before getting ready for a long flight 25.

How engineers decide on Ingenuity’s flight plan

When it comes to decide when and where the helicopter will fly, it’s not a simple problem to connect to a goal and press the button. The biggest concern of the team is preserving the helicopter as long as possible, so they aim to make her flight safe. In a recent blog post, Ben Morrell from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory – one of the engineers responsible for making an Ingenuity flight plan – describing how the team fulfilled his decision about 24th and 25th Ingenuity flights.

The team is considering three choices for flights, Morrell writes: a single single flight, two shorter flights, or one small hop followed by a longer flight. In making this decision, the team must compete with Mars’s changing season, which makes the atmosphere thin even thinner. It gave a challenge for a helicopter that made him upset by moving the air with his blade, so as to adapt to the atmospheric condition, he had to rotate the rotor even faster than before. But this higher rotor speed means faster heat components, so the team has maintained short ingenuity flights, up to 130 seconds or less to avoid overheating. However, now, Mars summer will end, which means air density increases again; That means the rotor speed can be reduced, it is possible for longer flights.