It’s hard to emphasise the significance of the milestone reached by NASA’s Mars helicopter, Ingenuity.
Small (1.8 kg) helicopter landed the Perseverance rover in 2021. On January 25, NASA announced the flying vehicle needed to make an emergency landing which damaged certainly one of its rotors and ended its mission.
This reminds us that space exploration remains to be difficult. However, Ingenuity’s three years on Mars proved that controlled powered flight on Mars is feasible.
The little helicopter lasted for much longer than planned and flew higher and farther than many expected. In addition to this Mars experiment, the success of the rotorcraft paves the way for other missions using flying vehicles to explore planets and moons.
The first landings on the Moon were static. The 12 months 1969 was arguably the most significant for space exploration when Apollo 11 AND Apollo 12 brought astronauts to the lunar surface, but 1970 was the 12 months of planetary exploration.
In 1970 we had the first soft landing on one other planet, Venus. First robot sample delivered to Earth from the Moon. And the first robot rover to orbit one other body (including the Moon).
Since then, after more than 50 years of planetary exploration and technology development, only a small variety of successful missions have been carried out to the surface, and even fewer have been in a position to move. Venus was visited by a dozen static landers between 1970 and 1985, and never again.
From rovers to helicopters
Between 1971 and 1976, Mars was successfully landed only 3 times Pathfinder lander and the Sojourner rover arrived in 1997. The European Huygens spacecraft then landed on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2005.
Attempts to achieve the surface are rare, extremely difficult, and historically, landers have almost never been mobile. And yet NASA Mars rovers Spirit, Opportunity, CuriosityAND Persistence everyone exceeded their plans and traveled further and further.
And Ingenuity flew.
It was not the first spacecraft to fly. These could be balloons deployed by Soviet Vega 1 and 2 missions, which hovered over Venus in 1985. But Ingenuity had control, cameras and communications. He took photos of his rover and Mars from a totally recent perspective. He caught the world’s attention and won our hearts.
In Moscow, I had the opportunity to see models and replicas of Vega balloons and the first lunar rover. They impressed me more than the twin Mars rovers used at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. Soviet missions were more daring and different, dating back generations, before my time and long before my profession as a planetary scientist.
The ingenuity was audacious, original and completely recent. His photos of Perseverance retrieving technology ejected from the descent module that carried it to Mars, in addition to aerial views of Mars, were breathtaking. Meanwhile, Perseverance also recorded videos of Ingenuity flying through the air. Never seen anything prefer it before.
NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben
Future flights
However, Ingenuity had difficulty reaching its goal. The entire Mars 2020 mission (Perseverance, Ingenuity, and their transportation systems) was sudden.
After NASA withdrew from the joint ExoMars program of the European Space Agency, which included a Mars rover mission, the American space agency began independent work on such a program. The rover, later named Perseverance, took just seven and a half years from announcement to concept, development and launch.
Initially, Ingenuity was not on board. The idea was proposed late in the development of Mars 2020 and was met with significant opposition. This added additional complexity, cost, risk and recent failure modes. It was also driven by an engineering goal, with the additional short-range capability of with the ability to communicate the mission’s science and engineering information to the public.
The ingenuity wasn’t going to last very long. It was designed to prove helicopter flight in the thin atmosphere of Mars. The goal was five short flights in a month. Possible effects included a tough landing, a rollover, a lack of power if the solar panels became covered in dust, or a lack of communication when it was removed from the rover (this happened several times).
NASA/JPL-Caltech
However, the craft exceeded expectations, surviving three years on the surface of Mars, even during the dusty season, and completing 72 flights. The communication network that currently exists on Mars has contributed greatly to this.
Ingenuity receives instructions and transmits data to Perseverance, which communicates with a fleet of satellites including Europe’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, NASA’s Maven spacecraft and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These in turn communicate with two space networks on Earth, radio antenna systems around the world that command and track the spacecraft.
It took 50 years of planetary exploration to get here, but we will already see the impact the Ingenuity mission is having on future exploration. The next interplanetary rotorcraft will probably be Dragonfly mission to Titan, a moon of Saturn.
It will probably be completely different from Ingenuity. It will weigh a couple of ton and fly with eight rotors. It is a large vehicle designed to fly in Titan’s dense atmosphere.
One of the next missions of the Red Planet will probably be Mars Sample Return, the aim of which will probably be to gather containers of Martian soil samples prepared and cached by Perseverance. This was planned to be done with a rover, but the success of the Ingenuity program led to the idea – and now development – helicopter to do that.
The future that Ingenuity has opened up for us is exciting. We’ll see helicopters on Mars and Venus, more balloons on Venus, vehicles flying under the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and possibly even a plane or two.
