Mars Helicopter Ingenuity is expected to lift off the surface of Mars on Sunday in its first historic attempt in its tech demo, with the first images available to Earth early Monday.
From all reports, the launch is a go. A livestream is targeted to begin around 3:30 a.m. EDT Monday on NASA TV and other channels. Updates on the schedule can be found on NASA’s Watch Online webpage.
What did it take to get Ingenuity this far? Several years ago, NASA’s JPL team began analyzing what it would take for an unmanned drone to fly in the super thin atmosphere of Mars, just 1% that of Earth’s atmosphere.
Clearly, they knew it had to be lightweight and now is just 4 pounds. Next, it had to have rotors that could spin several times faster than drones on Earth, so there are now two counter-rotating blades about four-feet-long and made of lightweight, sturdy material that spin at 2400 rpm.
But if it were able to achieve liftoff, what next? Processing power was another key ingredient to give the drone the ability to analyze pre-loaded commands for when to lift off and land and where to steer. The processor also would be needed to monitor the health of the battery power and the small heater aboard to protect against Martian nights of minus 90-degrees F.
There were many other considerations: What if a sudden Martian gust of wind were to knock it sideways when airborne? How would it know where to go? All those adjustments and more come down to processor power.
It turns out that the main processor aboard Ingenuity is made by Qualcomm and not that different from processors used in smartphones of a couple of years ago. Qualcomm added its Snapdragon 801 to a credit-card sized board that turned it into a flight platform that runs on Linux and handles inertial guidance and wide range of tasks.
The chip is a commercial off the shelf (COTS) part that when used with flight platform can be put into use for commercial drones or robots on Earth. Even today, Qualcomm sells its updated cousin as a development board for $749. A full dev board for users with advanced skills comes with a later generation Snapdragon 820 chip, power supply and cables that goes for $949.
When the processor flight platform was chosen by NASA/JPL more than two years ago, it was much smaller in size and more powerful than anything available prior to that time. The processor on the Ingenuity helicopter is 100 times more powerful than processors used on the Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012.
“Back then, nothing like it was available,” said Tim Canham, Ingenuity Operations Lead for JPL. “It’s now taking 500 measurements and 30 images per second and tracks ground features frame to frame.”
Ingenuity chief engineer for JPL Bob Balaram recently pegged the computing power aboard the Mars Helicopter at two times the power of all computers now in outer space. It’s easy to take something so small for granted.
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The tracking of ground features is how Ingenuity will know where to steer. There is no joystick or real-time operation since Mars is so far from Earth, so crews on Earth will load up a course and mission command in advance via Mars orbiters and the Perseverance rover. That data tells Ingenuity everything, including the high-res map with rock features that it will encounter as it flies along.
Ingenuity uses that pre-loaded map location data to compare with what it sees real time with cameras on board, then makes tiny adjustments to follow its course. The first flight on Sunday will be simple: just up and down reaching a height of perhaps 10-15 feet and only lasting 20 to 30 seconds. If successful, up to four more flights will give Ingenuity a pathway to fly further, when navigation will be ever more critical.
The processor power aboard Ingenuity is also constantly monitoring its health, from how much power it has stored in its batteries received from its solar panels to the internal temperature. Tests have been conducted on the rotors, all recorded and sent back to Perseverance and eventually to Earth.
Canham said the JPL team wrote guidance software to work with sensors aboard Ingenuity to handle wind gusts. As with everything, wind gusts were tested in a lab. “Ingenuity can react to a certain level of wind,” he said. “If it gusts to one side, it corrects.” The tests were done by hanging a twin of Ingenuity in a low-pressure enclosure with the same atmosphere of Mars and a “huge wall of fans to see it fighting against the wind and how it performs.”
Qualcomm has had a decades-long relationship with NASA. When it came to Ingenuity and its processing power, it was a question of collaborating with NASA to adapt known technology as opposed to creating a new chip from scratch.
“Adapting is much more beneficial,” said Chris Pruetting, senior director of business development for Qualcomm Government Technologies. “We treat collaboration very seriously. We treat collaboration as key from the beginning as opposed to throwing something over the wall.”
Dev Singh, general manager of robotics, drones and intelligent machines at Qualcomm, said Qualcomm engineers are viewed by NASA, the Department of Defense and large commercial enterprises as “trusted advisors.” In the Ingenuity collaboration with NASA, questions were raised about whether the flight platform could handle the cold and manage the heater on board or the shock from blastoff from Earth and from landing on Mars.
“NASA was thankful to have a group to talk to and review schematics,” Pruetting said. “There was a lot of IP and a lot of ideas that went into the 801 flight reference design. Thousands of people worked on that chipset although it was a lower number of people consulting. It takes a village, or an army, to do it all.”
As for the expected flight on Sunday, Pruetting couldn’t be happier, just like thousands of engineers working at hundreds of supporting companies and at NASA/JPL. “The components are performing better than expected which is very exciting,” he said. “The rotors are now released and all systems are nominal. There are now raw images from the helicopter being posted.”
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