Tech News

NASA Lands Ingenuity, the ever-present Mars helicopter

[ad_1]

This very early in the morning, NASA flew a small drone helicopter that took its last vehicle to Mars, marking the first flight controlled and powered by humans on another planet. The invention stuck to the landing and the space engineers tightened up.

“We’re happy, of course,” said Matthew Golomb, NASA’s chief research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, shortly after the invention team was successful in its call to WIRED. He said the data that went into JPL computers on Monday morning was “nominal,” NASA said in the best case scenario. “Every time you land a spaceship, it’s a pretty good moment,” Golomb said.

The invention rose about 1 meter per second to 3 meters — about 10 meters from Mars. The helicopter hung as uniformly as its state-of-the-art electronics allowed, and then landed where it was 40 seconds earlier. Then Invention sent a message they had been looking for for almost a decade to Earth engineers: mission accomplished. The drone he was walking in sent a black-and-white video of his shadow and the Perseverance rover high-resolution camera shot shots of the flight and landing from a distance.

“Now we can say that humans made an aircraft engine on another planet,” project director MiMi Aung told his team after the flight that he was in front of a giant wall art that read “DARE MIGHTY THINGS”. it was also engine drop coded in parachute.

The machines sent to humanity by Mars have become more and more sophisticated since Sojourner’s first vehicle was launched in 1997. This robot put the first wheels on Mars and its cousins, Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity, took them to the science experiment department. But Sustainability – the largest in the range, which landed in February– He has been driving around the Red Planet with a helicopter in his stomach. Asthma is NASA’s first attempt to fly a drone on another planet. The space agency and the contractors involved in its design want to learn lessons from its flight data to design larger prospects for future missions.

At a press conference Monday morning, Aung called it an “absolutely beautiful flight” when he saw a video sent from the vehicle. “I don’t think I’m going to stop seeing it again and again,” he said.

The Sojourner technology show gave NASA in 1997 a validation for subsequent walkers, JPL director Michael Watkins said at a news conference. “What the intelligence team has done has given us a third dimension,” Watkins said. “I think that’s the way to build the future.”

The invention looks like a bright four-legged mosquito, rocking two helicopter rotor blades and a solar panel on its head. It is about 2 feet high, and its 15-inch legs keep it upright in the harsh foreign soil. The paddles of the 4-foot-wide carbon fiber rotors rotate quickly to carry the body Nothing else each item is enough to store the battery, sensors, cameras, and brain that works in concert.

Flying to Mars is different than flying to Earth. Gravity is 62 percent weaker there, but the atmosphere is 99 percent thinner and provides much less lift. It would be like flying a helicopter at an altitude of 100,000 meters on the ground, with a record high flight for a helicopter of less than 41,000 feet and 85,000 for an airplane. The blades of the rotors of the intellect rotate up to 2,537 revolutions per minute to complete, five times faster than the blades of a helicopter used on Earth.

[ad_2]

Source link

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button