If all goes well, the NASA Mars copter Ingenuity will fly later this week.
The Kitty Hawk flight will be basically takeoff, hover, and land. If that dog dances, then they’ll try some more challenging flights.
This month Evan Ackerman interviewed Ingenuity’s chief pilot, Håvard Grip (if that is his real name : – ) ), about just how to fly it [1].
Remember, the round trip signal time is quite a few minutes, so even if the copter had a radio control it wouldn’t be possible to joystick it. So it’s autonomous flight or none.
And, of course, it isn’t possible to actually test the system incrementally. There first flight will be the first test ever under real conditions, which are nothing like Earth, at least for flying. Gravity is lower (that’s good) but the air is very thin (bad). There is a lot of dust in the air (bad for machines) but no clouds, fog, or rain (good). Aerodynamics and most mechanics work the same as on Earth (that’s good), but rotors work differently.
In short, it should be possible to fly, but the details of a successful flying machine for Mars are quite different than on Earth.
This is pretty risky thing, even compared to the rest of the mission.
How was the Mars copter developed?
Basically, NASA simulated the heck out of this copter, building a very detailed digital model of the craft and the Martian environment. This simulation was run zillions of times, and was validated with a ton of studies that measured aspects of the system that could be tested on Earth.
Notably, these simulations include imperfections: noise in sensors, equipment degradation, capricious wind gusts, etc. And, as Grip puts it, “It’s about anchoring it in real data”.
We’ll all be watching to see how well it works.
Fly, fly, little copter!
- Evan Ackerman, Ingenuity’s Chief Pilot Explains How to Fly a Helicopter on Mars, in IEEE Spectrum – Robotics, April 8, 2021. https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/space-robots/ingenuity-how-to-fly-a-helicopter-on-mars
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