JPL Team Prepares to Make History With First Helicopter Flight on Another World

A team of engineers in Pasadena are eagerly awaiting their chance to become the first humans to operate a helicopter on Mars, or any other planet besides Earth.

With just over two weeks until the planned launch of NASA’s Mars 2020 Mission, which will carry the Jet Propulsion Laboratory-built Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter, they won’t have to wait much longer.

The small helicopter attached to the belly of the rover is a proof of concept project designed primarily to show that what the team is trying to accomplish is possible, explained Ingenuity Chief Pilot Håvard Grip of NASA’s JPL.

“Sometimes you have to do something just to show you can do it,” he said. “When the Wright brothers flew for the first time, they flew an experimental aircraft. And in the same way, the Mars helicopters are designed to show that we can fly powered helicopter flights in the Martian atmosphere.”

The information gathered will help engineers design,build and fly future space probes, according to JPL.

“Our priority will be to get back engineering telemetry and not so much images, but I’m sure we’ll return a few, because they always look cool,” “Ingenuity Chief Enginner Bob Balaram said.

Flying a helicopter on Mars poses a series of unique challenges, which the team at JPL has tackled one-by-one, Ingenuity Project Manager MiMi Aung of JPL said.

“It’s extremely difficult to fly at mars because the atmosphere is so thin. Compared to Earth’s, Mars’ is less than 1%,” she said.

So engineers needed to come up with a design that was light enough to get airborne in the barely-existent Martian air, but also powerful enough to whip the twin pair of 4-foot-long carbon-fiber rotor blades around at between 2,000 and 3,000 rotations per minute, as required to get airborne on Mars. The ultimate design has a box-shaped fuselage and ways about 4 pounds.

The aircraft must also be able to conduct it’s flights completely autonomously, Grip explained.

Depending on the positions of the Earth and Mars in their respective orbits, commands sent to Mars via radio waves, which travel at the speed of light, take between eight and 22 minutes to reach Mars. The pilots will program pre-planned flights, but will not have the ability to control the craft in real time.

“It has to be fully autonomous from the time it takes off to the time it lands,” Grip said.

A series of flights is planned over a period of 30 Martian days, Aung said.

The first flight will likely be a brief hover at an altitude of about 9 feet, KGrip said. “That will be the first major milestone.”

The Ingenuity Mars helicopter will travel farther and farther in subsequent flights, Aung added.

But first, the helicopter and rover will need to travel more than 314 million miles through space and safely touch down on Mars. The launch window for the mission opens July 30 and remains open through mid-August. Arrival at Mars  Jezero Crater is anticipated on Feb. 18, 2021.

Having meticulously worked out every detail of the helicopter, Balaram said he was optimistic about the mission.

“There’s a very good chance that we’ll pull it off, but it’s still high risk,” he said. “And none of us forgets that you could have a glitch that could mean end of mission.”

Anticipation was growing as the launch date drew nearer, Aung said.

“From day one, this was the unwavering dream of our team: To get our helicopter launched to Mars, so that we can get an opportunity to do that very first rotorcraft flight test in the environment of Mars,” she said.

“It’s going to be exciting reacting to any surprises we have,” she said. “We can’t wait.”

More information about the Mars 2020 Mission, the Perseverance rover and the Mars Ingenuity helicopter is available on JPL’s website at jpl.nasa.gov.