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{♫Intro♫}
When it comes to spaceflight, a lot of what we get to do is not so much flying as it is
falling... with style, of course.
But soon, NASA plans to complete the very first powered, controlled flight on another
world.
After 6 years of design and testing, a 1.8 kilogram helicopter named Ingenuity is planned
to take flight on Mars.
Ingenuity traveled to the red planet hiding under the Perseverance rover, which landed
on February 18th.
But it took some time to identify a safe place for Ingenuity’s flight.
NASA needed a 10 by 10 meter region sufficiently flat and free from debris, and then had to
drive Percy there.
After that, it took 6 whole days to lower Ingenuity onto the surface and separate it
from the rover.
The first goal: Surviving the cold temperatures of a Martian night.
Which they did.
But that’s not the only hurdle engineers had to anticipate when designing Ingenuity.
Since Mars’s atmosphere is only about 1% the density of Earth’s, both generating
lift and maneuvering are more difficult.
That’s why Ingenuity has larger blades, at about 1.2 meters, and has to spin them
faster than if it were flying on Earth.
Remember -- that’s for a 2-kilo craft!
And it’s despite the fact that it’s fighting Mars’s lower gravitational pull, which is
less than half of Earth’s.
The other challenge is flying at the exact right time – it needs enough daylight before
the flight to charge its batteries, but it can’t lift off too late in the day because
it needs enough energy stored when the Sun sets so its internal heaters can keep it from
freezing.
An anomaly during a pre-flight test pushed back the anticipated launch date by a few
days.
At the time we’re filming this, engineers are working on a software fix, which they’re
hoping will get Ingenuity off the ground soon.
We’d hoped to bring you the results from its maiden voyage today, but spaceflight gonna
spaceflight.
And you have to admit designing and uploading a software patch to a whole other planet takes…
haha… ingenuity.
Because of the communications delay between Mars and Earth, Ingenuity will have to make
its expected 40ish-second flight all by itself – just like Perseverance had to do during
part of its descent.
That may not sound very long, but it’s longer than the 12 seconds the Wright Brothers managed
to do back in 1903.
And here’s a fun fact – a piece of fabric from that plane is actually stored on Ingenuity.
If Ingenuity’s solar panels can continue to charge its batteries, it could make up
to four more test flights in the next few weeks.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
Ingenuity is purely meant as a proof of concept – to test the feasibility of flight on Mars.
It doesn’t have any instruments onboard to do any science.
But it opens the doors for future missions to do just that, and provide a new way we
can study our neighboring planet.
Meanwhile, in some more ancient Mars news, another Martian rover is hard at work studying
the red planet’s watery past.
Last week in the journal Geology, scientists revealed Mars may not have dried up the way
we’ve been thinking.
NASA’s Curiosity rover is currently hanging out near a mountain at the center of Gale
Crater.
The area is full of sedimentary rock, meaning stuff that formed from the deposition of smaller
mineral pieces over time, either from water or wind.
And by pointing one of its cameras at the side of this mountain, Curiosity has revealed
a bunch of sedimentary layers made in different ways and stretching hundreds of meters tall.
And in geology, different layers can tell us about different time periods.
While humans have had eyes on this mountainside from orbit for some time, Curiosity’s much
closer vantage point has provided the detail we needed to decipher these layers – to
start figuring out their exact chemical composition and explain how they formed.
The base of the mountain is comprised of lake-deposited mudstones, which – as the name implies -- meant
the area was really wet at the time.
Above that layer is a drier sandstone, which the team argues was most likely made as wind
caused dunes to migrate to and fro during an arid period.
And above that layer is another wet section, which matches sedimentary deposits similar
to those formed at Earth’s river floodplains.
In contrast with scientists’ previous assumptions, this alternation of layers suggests that Mars
didn’t slowly and consistently lose its water over time.
It, well, alternated between wet and dry conditions, until about 3 billion years ago, when it became
the desert we know and love today.
Curiosity still has plenty left to do, including scaling up this mountain to drill into the
rocks and vaporize samples with a laser to determine their molecular composition, which
will paint us an even clearer picture of what happened all those eons ago.
Between insights from Curiosity and Perseverance, and new ways of exploring Mars thanks to Ingenuity’s
flights, our understanding of the Red Planet is really only just getting started.
We can’t hook you up with the opportunity to fly around and take pictures on another
planet.
But Skillshare can help you learn photography here at home.
Like with the class Fundamentals of DSLR Photography, taught by Justin Bridges.
It’ll help you get up to speed fast on how to really use all the settings your camera
has to offer.
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{♫Outro♫}