NASA’s Mars Drone Is Still Flying: Engineers Surprise

The drone is light as a feather and lands on four slender legs. The fact that it’s still simmering in Mars’ ultra-thin atmosphere surprises NASA engineers.

After its 49th flight over the Red Planet on April 2 of this year, the drone disappeared “off the radar” of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Then it was clevernessclevernessMeans ingenuity. It was a record height of 15.9 meters in the air.

After landing, the NASA team attempted to upload instructions for the next flight, to no avail.

For about a week, the team looked for “signs of life” from the drone.

But — six days later, a “simple, lonely” radio signal came, as he writes Washington Post.

NASA engineer Travis Brown is from a A blog post at the end of May, It gives an insight into the ‘resurrection’ of creativity.

Hope was two days

Initially, the hope was that the highly advanced, $80 million (881 million kroner) craft would operate in the inhospitable environment of Mars for 30 days.

“None of the mechanisms are designed to last longer than that,” Teddy Zanetos tells The Washington Post.

Norwegian behind the jacks

Norway’s Harvard Veer Grip and his team were behind the cranes when NASA successfully flew the drone to Mars on April 19, 2021.

The short flight of 25 seconds, including stopping and “spinning”, was the first motor-controlled flight in history on another planet.

Fjær Grip works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech in Pasadena, Los Angeles, and is central to the ingenuity project, According to NTB.

Less than 2 kilos

The drone weighs about 1.8 kilograms, has a height of about half a meter and is packed with avionics. Underneath the body are four slender legs at one end and two rotating blades and a solar panel at the other.

Winter survived

One of the steps taken to get creative during the frigid Martian winter was to use sunrise data from Mars to calculate when each morning the helicopter would defrost and recover enough charge to power it.

Few thought that batteries charged with solar energy would survive the winter.

The helicopter entered a reduced power state after its 28th flight and the researchers For The Washington Post They weren’t sure if the drone would ever fly again.

Soil samples are expected from March in the year 2033

The Mars project has been so successful that NASA, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), plans to send two new unmanned aircraft to Mars.

They will help collect samples from the surface of Mars that will later be sent to Earth.

The Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars with Ingenuity in February 2021, is afoot with collecting such samples.

Each is about the thickness of a pencil and weighs about 150 grams, and the robotic vehicle has secured ten of them.

NASA said 11 more are in the process of being onboarded, according to NTB.

If all goes according to plan, it will be sent to Earth in 2033!