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+--- Thread: First 'space helicopter' set to take to Martian skies (/showthread.php?tid=252876)
First 'space helicopter' set to take to Martian skies - SteveG - 02-13-2021
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/first-space-helicopter-set-take-martian-skies-n1257617
When NASA's Perseverance rover touches down next week, it will carry one of the strangest devices ever seen on Mars — a drone destined to make the first controlled flights on an extraterrestrial planet.
Dubbed “Ingenuity,” the drone weighs just 4 pounds, and it will stay stored beneath the rover’s belly while Perseverance runs through its initial surface checks and experiments.
But about the middle of April, the rover will scout out a flat area without large rocks to deploy the drone, and soon after that Perseverance will release Ingenuity to make the first flights on Mars.
“It's pretty unique in that it's a helicopter that can fly around,” said Tim Canham, the operations lead for the Ingenuity project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
“There was a balloon mission on Venus years ago, so we can't claim to be the first aircraft,” he said, referring to the two Soviet Vega space probes that deployed balloons attached to scientific instruments in the clouds on Venus in 1985. “But we can claim we’re the first powered aircraft outside Earth.”
Canham will coordinate the five test flights scheduled for the Ingenuity drone over 30 days, with each at least three days apart.
“The first flight will be very basic – it will just go straight up, hover and go straight down,” he said. “After that, we’ll do a couple of flights where we go horizontally, to test how it works.”
The car-size Perseverance rover has seven complex scientific instruments, so it can take panoramic video, monitor the weather, perform ultraviolet and X-ray spectroscopy on anything it finds, and look for signs of ancient microbial life.
Re: . - mattkime - 02-13-2021
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