{"id":18189,"date":"2021-04-20T11:42:53","date_gmt":"2021-04-20T10:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ounews.co\/?p=18189"},"modified":"2021-04-20T11:42:53","modified_gmt":"2021-04-20T10:42:53","slug":"mars-how-ingenuity-helicopter-made-the-first-flight-on-another-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/science-mct\/mars-how-ingenuity-helicopter-made-the-first-flight-on-another-planet\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars: how Ingenuity helicopter made the first flight on another planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by Monica Grady<\/a>, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences,\u00a0The Open University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Imagine that you are flying a model helicopter or a drone. You are there with the auto controls. You switch them on. The rotors start to turn, gradually increasing their spin. You watch, then push the control for lift. Your helicopter rises, hovers, then at the next command moves forward. Oops, it didn\u2019t go high enough. You quickly move the joystick and the drone rises to fly above the obstruction. Finally it\u2019s in the air, moving at speed above sand dunes, hills and valleys \u2013 sending back pictures as the landscape unfolds.<\/p>\n

Now imagine that you are flying your drone on a planet 180 million kilometres away. It takes 20 minutes for your command to reach the planet \u2013 and the pictures you see of what is happening are 20 minutes old. You cannot take evasive or corrective action if anything goes wrong. If it went wrong, it would be too late. This is the type of situation that Nasa\u2019s engineers did not wish to experience on the maiden flight of the\u00a0Ingenuity helicopter<\/a>\u00a0on Mars on April 19.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0luckily they didn\u2019t<\/a>. The flight had already been postponed because of software problems. Given the issue with the time delay between Mars and Earth, all the commands to operate Ingenuity had to be sent in advance \u2013 and so the engineers had to be certain that their command sequences were error free.<\/p>\n

All the planning and calculations paid off. Just after 12:00 BST, a Nasa engineer announced to mission control that \u201call data sets are nominal\u201d. This, of course, is space-talk for: \u201cWe are incredibly happy, everything has gone well.\u201d A few minutes later, we saw the data \u2013 a rather unprepossessing graph. But it was sufficient for the engineers in mission control to clap and cheer.<\/p>\n

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Then <\/span>came the images<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 the first from Ingenuity\u2019s camera, a picture of its own shadow as it hovered above the surface. Pretty amazing \u2013 but we have seen spacecraft shadows before. Then the video \u2013 which was, for me, utterly mind-blowing. Taken by the\u00a0<\/span>Perseverance rover<\/a>, it showed its travelling companion\u2019s complete flight, from take off to landing. It\u2019s a film of the first powered flight on another planet, taken by one robot of another. It was almost too clever \u2013 it looked like some of the animations that Nasa is so good at producing. But it was real. And it was awesome.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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