NASA/JPL-CALTECH PHOTO


“Nerve-Wracking” Flight Tests Constructing Ingenuity was only half the battle. Te helicopter needed to survive a battery of several hundred grueling flight tests, as well. In one test that simulated the vibrations of


a rocket launch, the helicopter was secured to a platform on which it shuddered into a blur, sustaining up to a crushing 60 G of force for a split second. In another experiment, Ingenuity was placed in a liquid nitrogen chamber and cooled to below -200°F to see if its components continued to work. An oven test recorded the same observations at temperatures exceeding 200°. Wind-tunnel tests revealed the aircraft could withstand winds up to 20 kt. Ingenuity’s ability to automatically avoid


obstacles using its camera was also evaluated in a large, circular room where dozens of X-shaped strips of tape were stuck to the floor to simulate rocks. Te helicopter was required to identify and navigate away from these “bar- riers” in locating a safe landing spot. Contamination control played an important


role during testing, and that meant keeping everything squeaky clean. “We don’t want anything hitching a ride,” says Pipenberg about why a sterile environment is critical. Bringing


microbes or other particulate Earth life to the Red Planet would jeopardize NASA’s search for Martian life. “Te Ingenuity team did everything to test


the helicopter on Earth,” adds MiMi Aung, engineer and Ingenuity’s project manager at JPL. “It will be another way to explore other worlds.” “Nerve-wracking,” is how Pipenberg describes


the tests. “Tere was less than a 5% margin for error and there are thousands of ways to fail. Te flight looks uneventful, but when it’s 173 million to 211 million miles away, depending on the elliptical orbits of the two planets, every second was very stressful for the whole oper- ations team. Everything must work perfectly.”


And it did. Te tests were so complete that


nothing was overlooked, giving the team confidence the hardware would work as expected. “Tere were no surprises on the Mars flights,” Pipenberg says.


A Journey Two Decades in the Making


Ingenuity’s first flight on Mars concluded a long journey that began in 2003 when a team


at the University of Maryland produced a design for flying a helicopter on the planet for NASA, recalls Anubhav Datta, associate pro- fessor of aerospace engineering at the school. “Te Mars Helicopter is similar [to that first one]—two rotors with two blades,” he says. But then progress stalled. “Nothing happened,”


Datta says. “It was entirely and singularly a JPL effort to procure the funding and convince management that this was a project of national aspiration and impact.” Te project didn’t move ahead until 2015, when NASA asked Datta to work with AeroVironment to help design and stress-test the blades. “Since [NASA’s] Viking [Project, the first


US mission to land a spacecraft safely on Mars and return images of the surface to Earth, in the late 1970s], we’ve been spending less and less on Mars missions and science and tech- nology,” Datta says. “Big Science requires the right timing, the right money, the right politics, the right people, and the right technology. Most of today’s challenges revolve around the first three. Te US has been and remains inherently strong on the last two.” Ingenuity’s success inspired NASA to draw


This image of Mars was taken from a height of 33 ft. (10 m) by Ingenuity during its sixth flight, on May 22, 2021. One goal of the Mars Helicopter technology demonstration project was to enable future missions to leverage the greater situational awareness provided by an aerial perspective.


44 ROTOR JUNE 2021


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