NASA will soon try to fly a helicopter over Mars: “It really is like the Wright brothers’ moment” – CBS News

With eight successful Mars landings, NASA is upping the ante with the spacecraft Perseverance. Attach for liftoff this week, the latest rover is taking a helicopter alongside for an otherworldly test flight.

The 4-pound helicopter, Ingenuity, will sprint to Mars clutching the rover’s belly and, about a months after touchdown, are trying to fly solo. Once dropping onto the Martian surface, Ingenuity will originate out luxuriate in a toddler rooster, rising 10 feet into the planet’s extraordinarily skinny atmosphere and flying forward as much as 6 feet. With each and every are trying, this can are trying and disappear rather elevated and farther.

“It in point of fact is luxuriate in the Wright brothers’ moment,” mentioned project manager MiMi Aung. She has one month to squeeze in as many helicopter hops as imaginable sooner than the rover strikes on to more pressing geologic work. The long flow might perchance well perchance survey subsequent-generation helicopters scouting out some distance away Martian territory for astronauts or even robots.

Perseverance sports actions the latest touchdown tech, plus primarily the most cameras and microphones ever assembled to grab the sights and sounds of Mars. Its substantial-sanitized sample return tubes – for rocks that will perchance perchance withhold proof of previous Martian existence — are the cleanest objects ever sure for place apart.

This summer’s third and final mission to Mars — after the United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter and China’s Quest for Pleasing Reality orbiter-rover combo — begins with a open scheduled for Thursday morning from Cape Canaveral. Be pleased the opposite spacecraft, Perseverance need to quiet attain the red planet subsequent February following a sprint spanning seven months and more than 300 million miles.

Right here’s a learn at Perseverance:

Perseverance vs. Curiosity

The six-wheeled, automotive-sized Perseverance is a copycat of NASA’s Curiosity rover, prowling Mars since 2012, nonetheless with more upgrades and bulk. Its 7-foot (2-meter) robotic arm has a stronger grip and bigger drill for gathering rock samples, and it’s stuffed with 23 cameras, most of them in color, plus two more on Ingenuity, the hitchhiking helicopter. The cameras will provide the first peep of a parachute billowing originate at Mars, with two microphones letting Earthlings eavesdrop for the first time. Once house to a river delta and lake, Jezero Crater is NASA’s riskiest Martian touchdown jam yet resulting from boulders and cliffs, with any luck refrained from by the spacecraft’s self-navigating methods. Perseverance has more self-driving functionality, too, so it will cowl more ground than Curiosity. The enhancements obtain for a elevated mission trace trace: nearly $3 billion.

Pattern sequence

Perseverance will drill into rocks likely to withhold signs of frail existence and stash the sequence on the bottom to await a future rover. Forty-three sample tubes are on board this rover, each and every meticulously scrubbed and baked to safe Earthly microbes. NASA desires to lead sure of introducing natural molecules from Earth to the returning Martian samples. Each tube can withhold one-half ounce (15 grams) of core samples, and the aim is to obtain a pair of pound (0.5 kilogram) altogether for return to Earth. NASA hopes to open the pickup mission in 2026 and obtain the samples attend on Earth by 2031 – at the soonest.

Human advantages

Moreover the helicopter, Perseverance carries other experiments that will perchance perchance straight away abet astronauts at Mars. An instrument the dimensions of a automotive battery will covert atmospheric carbon dioxide into oxygen, the largest ingredient for rocket propellant and breathing methods. One other instrument, zapping rocks with lasers to determine natural molecules and minerals, carries samples of spacesuit cloth. NASA desires to survey how the fabrics withstand the cruel Martian atmosphere. It need to be the 2030s at easiest, primarily based mostly mostly on NASA, sooner than astronauts project to Mars.

Frigid stowaways

A pair Martian meteorites are by some means headed house, or at the very least slivers of them to be feeble as calibration targets by laser-taking pictures devices aboard Perseverance. Varied cold stowaways: silicon chips bearing the names of nearly 11 million folks that signed up, as properly as a runt plate exhibiting Earth and Mars on opposite facets of the solar with the message “stumble on as one” in Morse code tucked into the solar rays. There might perchance be moreover a plaque paying tribute to scientific employees on the pandemic’s entrance traces. The coronavirus is fighting tons of of scientists and other group members from touring to Cape Canaveral for the open.

“Seven minutes of fear”

NASA scientists and engineers name it “the seven minutes of fear”: the stressful 420 seconds of breath-retaining suspense as a Mars rover takes administration of its earn future and attempts to autonomously land on the red planet. The time length is named for the time that elapses between the rover’s touchdown pill entering the Martian atmosphere to touching down on the planet’s surface. At some level of that length, the rover depends on a chain of preprogramed knowledge and now not human engineers in NASA’s master administration. 

“It’s nerve-wracking,” Matt Wallace, a deputy project manager at NASA, told “60 Minutes.” “It’s no doubt primarily the most complex portion of the mission.”