December 17 is an historic day for flying machines, so it wouldn't be surprising if the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter makes an attempt at its 18th flight sometime today. On this day in 1903, the Wright Brothers had their first successful flight, flying their plane for 120 feet over 12 seconds.
On December 5, 2021, Ingenuity flew for the 17th time. The fact that Ingenuity has so many flights under its wings is amazing. The tiny helicopter was only designed for five flights on the Red Planet, but now it has accumulated over 30 minutes of flying time on Mars.
The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors, who looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.
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David Hitt wrote on December 17, 2017:
The 17th flight of Ingenuity lasted for just over a minute and it will be the first aircraft to operate from the surface of another world.
There are a lot of similarities between the Wright brothers and Ingenuity. Ingenuity team lead, Mimi Aung, said in an interview that both teams took the idea of flight from a concept, and then did it.
The Wright brothers are role models for the team. From a question of feasibility, they took flying humans on a plane. We received the same questions. Can you make it happen because there is no atmosphere at Mars?
The answer has been yes. The rotocraft flew as high as 40 feet (12 meters) and as fast as 10 mph (5 meters per second) over a distance of 2.2 miles.
The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter captured this shot as it hovered over the Martian surface on April 19, 2021, during the first instance of powered, controlled flight on another planet. The navigation camera autonomously tracks the ground during flight. The credits are from NASA/JPL-Caltech.
There were some nail-biting moments. The team back on Earth didn't know if Ingenuity had landed safely because of an unexpected cutoff in the in-flight data stream. The Perseverance rover is the helicopter's communications base station and communication link between the two was temporarily severed.
Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity Team, said that the Ingenuity helicopter and the base station on the Perseverance rover had their data communications interrupted when the signal was blocked by elevated terrain. Ingenuity can be seen behind a hill or out of the rover's line of sight.
The flight path of Ingenuity is depicted in yellow in this annotated image. The location of Perseverance is shown in the upper left, with a blue line showing its line of sight to the helicopter. The altitude of the surface features between the helicopter and rover can be seen on the map. NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Flight 17 was a success and Ingenuity is in excellent condition, according to data downlinked to mission engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
On April 19, 2021, the tiny 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) rotorcraft flew for the first time, with a short up-and-down hop, to prove it was possible to fly on Mars.
Few thought we would make it to flight one. Tzanetos said that no one thought Ingenuity would make it this far. The design and passion of the small operations team is reflected in the continued operations of the aircraft.
The plan for Flight 18 is to cover another 754 feet at a speed of 5.6 mph. The team expects this flight to push the limits of Ingenuity. The Mars Helicopter team has modified the flight sequence to communicate in a low-data-rate mode, which will provide an additional signal strength boost to the radio link.
Tzanetos said that it may take several days or weeks until the line-of-sight between Ingenuity and Perseverance improves enough to attempt a communication session. It's not surprising that we have to delay our post-flight data analysis, as we continue to operate in challenging terrain in the weeks ahead.
It is all about pushing the boundaries on the high frontier.
