Exploring the Red Planet

[Sylvia]

NASA Mars Exploration

NASA’s real-time portal for Mars exploration, featuring the latest news, images, and discoveries from the Red Planet.

mars.nasa.gov

"Today, the Ingenuity #MarsHelicopter became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet."
NASA press conference link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM_2hmdRnfQ

ETA:

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Succeeds in Historic First Flight - NASA

Monday, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. The Ingenuity team at

www.nasa.gov

Nasa successfully flies small helicopter on Mars

The Ingenuity drone completes the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another world.

www.bbc.com

 

[PeterG]

On the same day, approximately 8,493 children died from undernutrition. This number is true for every day of the year. The majority of those children have black and brown skin.

WORLD CHILD HUNGER FACTS

 

[Sylvia]

NASA scores Wright Brothers moment with first helicopter flight on Mars

NASA scored a 21st-century Wright Brothers moment on Monday as it sent its miniature robot helicopter Ingenuity buzzing above the surface of Mars for nearly 40 seconds, marking the first powered controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet.

www.reuters.com

Excerpts:

NASA likened the achievement to the Wright Brothers' first controlled flight of their motor-driven airplane near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903 - a takeoff and landing that covered just 120 feet (37 meters) in 12 seconds. [...]
In honor of the modest but monumental first human flight 117 years ago at Kitty Hawk, NASA officially designated Ingenuity's flight zone as Wright Brothers Field, a location recognized by the International Civil Aviation Organization in a certificate issued to NASA for the occasion.
NASA also paid tribute to the Wrights by affixing a tiny swatch of wing fabric from their original flyer under Ingenuity's solar panel before sending it off to Mars.

But NASA officials were less than sentimental about the fate facing their beloved Martian whirligig. JPL plans to press the aircraft to its brink with four more flights going farther, faster and higher over the next two weeks, they said. The first is targeted for Thursday.
"We will be pushing the envelope," Aung said. "And ultimately we expect the helicopter will meet its limits."
Ingenuity was developed as a technology demonstration, separate from Perseverance's primary mission to search for traces of ancient microorganisms and collect Martian rock samples. That mission will continue after Ingenuity's demise. [...]
While Mars possesses much less gravity to overcome than Earth, its atmosphere is just 1% as dense, making it especially difficult to generate aerodynamic lift. To compensate, engineers equipped Ingenuity with rotor blades that are larger (4 feet long) and spin far more rapidly than would be needed on Earth.

Because of the enormous distances involved, Ingenuity was designed to execute pre-programmed flight instructions autonomously, using advanced onboard pilot and navigation systems.
The small, lightweight aircraft also had to withstand punishing overnight Martian temperatures dropping as low as minus 130 Fahrenheit (minus 90 Celsius), using solar power alone to recharge and keep internal components properly heated.
The first flight was delayed a week by a technical glitch, but NASA resolved the issue by transmitting additional flight sequence commands last week.

 

[Sylvia]

Ingenuity Mars helicopter completes second successful test flight

Up to three more flights are planned before Ingenuity's test campaign comes to an end.

www.cbsnews.com

The helicopter's counter-rotating four-foot-long blades spun up to some 2,500 rpm at 5:33 a.m. EDT (12:33 p.m. local time on Mars), lifting the boxy drone to an altitude of 16 feet, about six feet higher than its initial test flight on Monday.
After briefly hovering in place, the drone's flight computer ordered a five-degree tilt and the craft slid sideways about seven feet.
...
Up to five test flights are planned, each one more challenging than the last. For its final planned flight, Ingenuity may climb as high as 30 feet or so and range several hundred feet from the takeoff point.

20-second video captured by the Perseverance rover’s Mastcam-Z imager on Thursday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNqWuM6-1vI

Nasa's Ingenuity helicopter makes second Mars flight

The Ingenuity drone introduces some lateral movement in its latest flight on the Red Planet.

www.bbc.com

Also running further tests will be the team behind Moxie - the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment.
This toaster-sized device, which lives in the belly of the Perseverance rover, also posted an exploration first by drawing O₂ out of Mars' air.
The planet's atmosphere is dominated by carbon dioxide at a concentration of 96%. Oxygen is only 0.13%, compared with 21% in Earth's atmosphere.
Moxie is able to strip oxygen atoms from CO₂ molecules, which are made up of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. The waste product is carbon monoxide, which is vented to the Martian atmosphere.
The Moxie team is running the unit in different modes to discover how well it works.
The expectation is that it can produce up to 10 grams of O₂ per hour.

ETA:

Blog post written by Håvard Grip, Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Chief Pilot at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

We Are Prepping for Ingenuity's Third Flight Test - NASA

Yesterday I got to write the entry for the second successful experimental flight test from "Wright Brothers Field" in the project’s official logbook, which is called "The Nominal Pilot’s Logbook for Planets and Moons."

mars.nasa.gov

 

[A.H.Black]

Here is the JPL site - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/. It also has great stories and news about the Mars Perseverance mission. It also has some great, fun projects for individuals and/or schools, like this one - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/.

Just as a point of interest. Two very avid figure skating fans are part of JPL. One of them is an engineer for the current Mars mission - one of those who actually makes the rover move.

Also, I am always fascinated by all the advances we have in everyday life because of space exploration, from the '50's on. https://news.fit.edu/archive/space-exploration-technologies/
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/pdf/spinoff2008.pdf

 

[Sylvia]

Today's updates (May 7):

NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Completes First One-Way Trip – NASA Mars Exploration

The Red Planet rotorcraft headed south in support of furthering research into the potential use of aerial scouts on Mars in the future.

mars.nasa.gov

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter completed its fifth flight on the Red Planet today with its first one-way journey from Wright Brothers Field to an airfield 423 feet (129 meters) to the south. After arrival above its new airfield, Ingenuity climbed to an altitude record of 33 feet (10 meters) and captured high-resolution color images of its new neighborhood before touching down.
The flight represents the rotorcraft’s transition to its new operations demonstration phase. This phase will focus on investigating what kind of capabilities a rotorcraft operating from Mars can provide. Examples include scouting, aerial observations of areas not accessible by a rover, and detailed stereo imaging from atmospheric altitudes. These operations and the lessons learned from them could significantly benefit future aerial exploration of Mars and other worlds.

Having successfully landed at its new airfield, Ingenuity will await future instructions, relayed via Perseverance, from mission controllers. The agency’s fifth rover to the fourth planet is also heading south, toward a region where it will commence science operations and sample collection. The rover team’s near-term strategy doesn’t require long drives that would leave the helicopter far behind, allowing Ingenuity to continue with this operations demonstration.
“The plan forward is to fly Ingenuity in a manner that does not reduce the pace of Perseverance science operations,” said Balaram. “We may get a couple more flights in over the next few weeks, and then the agency will evaluate how we’re doing. We have already been able to gather all the flight performance data that we originally came here to collect. Now, this new operations demo gives us an opportunity to further expand our knowledge of flying machines on other planets.”

NASA's Perseverance Captures Video, Audio of Fourth Ingenuity Flight – NASA Mars Exploration

Sounds of the Mars Helicopter’s whirring rotors add another new dimension to the historic project.

mars.nasa.gov

For the first time, a spacecraft on another planet has recorded the sounds of a separate spacecraft. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used one of its two microphones to listen as the Ingenuity helicopter flew for the fourth time on April 30, 2021. A new video combines footage of the solar-powered helicopter taken by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z imager with audio from a microphone belonging to the rover’s SuperCam laser instrument.
The laser zaps rocks from a distance, studying their vapor with a spectrometer to reveal their chemical composition. The instrument’s microphone records the sounds of those laser strikes, which provide information on the physical properties of the targets, such as their relative hardness. The microphone can also record ambient noise, like the Martian wind.

 

[Sylvia]

Anderson Cooper's 13-minute story for tonight's 60 Minutes (video & transcript):

NASA begins search for ancient life on Mars after arrival of Perseverance, Ingenuity spacecrafts

Anderson Cooper reports on the nerve-wracking Mars landing of the rover Perseverance, the painstaking process of launching the tiny helicopter Ingenuity, and the extraordinary images the two have already sent back to Earth.

www.cbsnews.com

 

[A.H.Black]

Was just coming to post the link. Yours' is better than mine as mine tends to freeze at the 6 min. mark - yours is good all the way through. I think I caught a split second shot of my engineer/figure skating fan. Cooper makes a small mention of the schedule changes - he doesn't tell how hard it is to be on that schedule. The group changes their schedule daily to match the rotation of Mars. Imagine going to work at 8:00 am one day, 8:40 am the next day, 9:20 am the next day, (not sure that's exactly correct) and on and on for the foreseeable future. I couldn't do it.

Thanks Sylvia

 

[Sylvia]

Reuters article just now:

China completes historic Mars spacecraft landing

An uncrewed Chinese spacecraft successfully landed on the surface of Mars on Saturday, state news agency Xinhua reported, making China the second space-faring nation after the United States to land on the Red Planet.

www.reuters.com

BBC News article: China lands its Zhurong rover on Mars

The six-wheeled Zhurong robot was targeting Utopia Planitia, a vast terrain in the planet's northern hemisphere.
The vehicle used a combination of a protective capsule, a parachute and a rocket platform to make the descent.
...
Zhurong, which means God of Fire, was carried to Mars on the Tianwen-1 orbiter, which arrived above the planet in February.
The time since has been spent surveying Utopia, taking high-resolution images to pinpoint the safest place to put down.
The aim with all such ventures is to pick a spot, as far as possible, that is devoid of imposing craters and large boulders.