13.12.2024
After crashing on Mars, NASA's Ingenuity helicopter could live on as a weather station for 20 years
"She still has one final gift for us, which is that she's now going to continue on as a weather station of sorts."
Ingenuity may be down, but it's not out.
Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) gave an update on the downed Ingenuity Mars helicopter on Wednesday (Dec. 11) during the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington, D.C. After traveling to Mars attached to the Perseverance rover, Ingenuity began a test flight campaign to prove that powered flight in the thin Martian atmospherewas possible. After almost three years of operating on the Red Planet, Ingenuity crashed during its 72nd flight on Jan. 18, 2024, suffering rotor damage that rendered it incapable of ever flying again.
But after conducting the "first aircraft investigation on another world," Ingenuity's mission managers at JPL say the helicopter could have a second life on the Red Planet. "We are very proud to report that, even after the hard landing in flight, 72 avionics battery sensors have all been functional, and she still has one final gift for us, which is that she's now going to continue on as a weather station of sorts, recording telemetry, taking images every single sol and storing them on board," said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity's project manager at JPL, during the team's presentation at AGU.
JPL has spent months investigating Ingenuity's crash, and determined that the helicopter's navigation systems had too little information to go with due to the monotone, bland texture of the Martian surface.
"This does not mean that we've been able to figure out everything about the flight," said Ingenuity’s first pilot, JPL's Håvard Grip, at today's presentation at AGU 2024. "Our conclusion is that we don't have enough information to disentangle some of the details about the sequence of events right around landing."
Grip added that, while the team's investigation is over, it is far from complete due to the vast distance between JPL and Ingenuity's final resting place.
"One of the things that makes it difficult to investigate this is the relative lack of information," he said. "The accident site itself is about, you know — it's more than 100 million miles [160 million kilometers] away. There's no black box, there are no eyewitnesses. We can't walk up and touch anything, so we have to work with the small pieces of information that we have."
This image, which shows the shadow of a damaged rotor on NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity, was taken after its 72nd and final flight on the Red Planet, on Jan. 18, 2024. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
However, JPL scientists added that, aside from its mission-ending rotor damage, Ingenuity remains in otherwise good health. In fact, if you were to ask the helicopter itself, Ingenuity would report that everything is fine, Tzanetos said.
"If you were to query Ingenuity's health system, she's green across the board as far as she's concerned. She doesn't have a sensor on the rotor system to detect the damage. But we are very proud to report that, even after the hard landing on flight 72, avionics, battery, [and] sensors have all been functional."
Tzanetos added that Ingenuity has around 20 years' worth of onboard storage remaining, meaning it can keep taking measurements and images every Martian sol (a solar day on Mars).
But there may be no way to get that data back to Earth. The Perseverance rover, through which Ingenuity communicates via radio link in order to send its data back to its mission team, is now 1.8 miles (3 km) away from the helicopter. Soon, Ingenuity might lose its ability to communicate with its human controllers on Earth.
"I think it's a good bet that, within the next month, we'll lose contact forever, or until we come back in 20 years with astronauts, or until we turn back for sample return," Tzanetos said during the presentation at AGU.
Despite its crash, Ingenuity proved to be wildly successful. The helicopter was designed to make only five flights on Mars, and ended up making 72. Because it was only a flight demonstrator, the helicopter was not designed to carry science instruments.
But JPL is already looking to the future of powered flight on Mars. During today's presentation at AGU, JPL scientists presented a video of a new Red Planet helicopter concept known as Mars Chopper.
The design is still conceptual and does not have a timeline for reaching Mars, but JPL is envisioning a six-rotor concept that is 20 times heavier than Ingenuity and could carry "several pounds of science equipment and autonomously explore remote Martian locations while traveling up to 2 miles (3 kilometers) in a day," according to a JPL statement.
Quelle: SC
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Update: 14.12.2024
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NASA’s Perseverance Rover Reaches Top of Jezero Crater Rim
The road ahead will be even more scientifically intriguing, and probably somewhat easier-going, now that the six-wheeler has completed its long climb to the top.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has crested the top of Jezero Crater’s rim at a location the science team calls “Lookout Hill” and rolling toward its first science stop after the monthslong climb. The rover made the ascent in order to explore a region of Mars unlike anywhere it has investigated before.
Taking about 3½ months and ascending 1,640 vertical feet (500 vertical meters), the rover climbed 20% grades, making stops along the way for science observations. Perseverance’s science team shared some of their work and future plans at a media briefing held Thursday, Dec. 12, in Washington at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, the country’s largest gathering of Earth and space scientists.
“During the Jezero Crater rim climb, our rover drivers have done an amazing job negotiating some of the toughest terrain we’ve encountered since landing,” said Steven Lee, deputy project manager for Perseverance at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “They developed innovative approaches to overcome these challenges — even tried driving backward to see if it would help — and the rover has come through it all like a champ. Perseverance is ‘go’ for everything the science team wants to throw at it during this next science campaign.”
Since landing at Jezero in February 2021, Perseverance has completed four science campaigns: the “Crater Floor,” “Fan Front,” “Upper Fan,” and “Margin Unit.” The science team is calling Perseverance’s fifth campaign the “Northern Rim” because its route covers the northern part of the southwestern section of Jezero’s rim. Over the first year of the Northern Rim campaign, the rover is expected to visit as many as four sites of geologic interest, take several samples, and drive about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers).
“The Northern Rim campaign brings us completely new scientific riches as Perseverance roves into fundamentally new geology,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for Perseverance at Caltech in Pasadena. “It marks our transition from rocks that partially filled Jezero Crater when it was formed by a massive impact about 3.9 billion years ago to rocks from deep down inside Mars that were thrown upward to form the crater rim after impact.”
“These rocks represent pieces of early Martian crust and are among the oldest rocks found anywhere in the solar system. Investigating them could help us understand what Mars — and our own planet — may have looked like in the beginning,” Farley added.
First Stop: ‘Witch Hazel Hill’
With Lookout Hill in its rearview mirror, Perseverance is headed to a scientifically significant rocky outcrop about 1,500 feet (450 meters) down the other side of the rim that the science team calls “Witch Hazel Hill.”
“The campaign starts off with a bang because Witch Hazel Hill represents over 330 feet of layered outcrop, where each layer is like a page in the book of Martian history. As we drive down the hill, we will be going back in time, investigating the ancient environments of Mars recorded in the crater rim,” said Candice Bedford, a Perseverance scientist from Purdue University in West Layfette, Indiana. “Then, after a steep descent, we take our first turns of the wheel away from the crater rim toward ‘Lac de Charmes,’ about 2 miles south.”
Lac de Charmes intrigues the science team because, being located on the plains beyond the rim, it is less likely to have been significantly affected by the formation of Jezero Crater.
After leaving Lac de Charmes, the rover will traverse about a mile (1.6 kilometers) back to the rim to investigate a stunning outcrop of large blocks known as megabreccia. These blocks may represent ancient bedrock broken up during the Isidis impact, a planet-altering event that likely excavated deep into the Martian crust as it created an impact basin some 745 miles (1,200 kilometers) wide, 3.9 billion years in the past.
Quelle: NASA