Ingenuity’s first flight on Mars was a stunning success, almost exactly as forecast in hundreds of simulations except for less dust being blown about than expected.
The 40-second flight actually helped disperse dust that had collected on the solar panels, so that Ingenuity could collect more solar energy, said Bob Balaram, chief Ingenuity engineer.
“Ingenuity is extremely healthy at this point,” Balaram said in a de-briefing session with reporters on Monday. In addition to shaking off dust, the batteries are “looking good, comms are fantastic” and the landing gear, solar mechanisms, computers and avionics “behaved flawlessly.”
“We’re excited to see what else she can teach us,” Balaram said.
Monday’s flight was historic in being the first successful flight of a powered craft on another world. Preparations are underway for the second fight, perhaps on Thursday, as more data and images are received from the Red Planet 178 million miles away.
There was about a 15% chance the flight on Monday wouldn’t go off, since there had been an earlier problem with a high-speed spin test. But NASA engineers were able to make modifications by adding a few commands in software to the flight operations sequence. Thursday’s flight will rely on that same modification.
Flight number 2 of Ingenuity will be slightly more complex than the maiden flight. On Monday, Ingenuity rose about 10 feet in the air, turned 96 degrees clockwise, hovered about 20 seconds and then set down. “It did it just perfectly,” said Havard Grip, Ingenuity chief pilot. “It was a flawless flight, a gentle take-off. It was pushed a little bit by the winds and stuck the landing right in the place where it was supposed to go.”
The second flight will take the little 4-pound helicopter higher than the first, to about 15 feet, and then it move laterally about six feet and come back those six feet before landing.
Flight 3 will rise also to about 15 feet, but it will fly laterally about 150 feet and back again.
Flights 4 and 5 should offer more opportunities to experiment, but NASA/JPL has only about another two weeks to finish all five. Ingenuity Project Manager MiMi Aung wants to fly further and faster than before, although the final limits are not yet decided. The coming days for up to four flights will be “increasingly difficult and challenging” to really learn what’s possible, she said.
Aung said she eventually hopes to fly Ingenuity 600 to 700 meters, about 1800 feet or more, away from its current location. “I care about going really far and fast,” she said.
Ingenuity has inspired other ideas for technology demonstrations on future rotorcraft flights, possibly even as part of a 2026 flight to Mars when a spaceship will arrive to collect soil and rock samples to return them to Earth.
NASA is already working on the Dragonfly drone that will fly on Titan, the largest moon on Saturn, which has greater air density than Earth’s atmosphere, said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the science directorate at NASA. Designs are underway for larger drones to fly on other planets that could weigh as much as 50 pounds.
The biggest challenge for Ingenuity was to spin up its rotors fast enough to create lift in the thin Martian atmosphere, just 1% of the atmosphere of Earth. Engineers said Ingenuity reached about 2500 rpm on Monday’s flight to lift off the surface, about five times the rpm of commercial drones that operate on Earth.
Getting that lift required designing a craft that was small and light, a process that started nearly seven years ago involving hundreds of engineers inside NASA/JPL and private companies that contributed.
Zurbuchen said when the original idea for a helicopter to fly on Mars was conceived it was a far-out dream. “It’s a fine line between crazy and innovating,” he said. “This team put that dream into reality.”
RELATED: Mars Helicopter Ingenuity succees as first powered craft to fly on another world