The battery power of the “Wit” Mars helicopter continues to decrease, and now the mission team is most concerned about whether the helicopter can survive the four-month Martian winter.
NASA had only intended to have the Intent Mars Helicopter complete five flights. But Wit has flown 28 times since its maiden flight on the surface of Mars in April 2021 and is preparing for its 29th. The flight was originally scheduled to take place this weekend, based on dust conditions on the Martian surface and the Perseverance rover’s operational schedule. But now the new challenge for the Intent helicopter is its ability to survive the long Martian winter. It’s unclear if the helicopter will survive the long Martian winter.
The “Wit” helicopter is currently located in the northern hemisphere of Mars and will usher in the Martian winter in July this year. Since a year on Mars is roughly equivalent to two years on Earth, this is also the first Martian winter that Witness will experience (last July was not a Martian winter). As the Martian winter solstice approaches, with shorter days and longer nights, dust storms may also allow solar panels mounted above the helicopter’s twin rotors to collect less sunlight. Thick dust covering solar panels recently ended NASA’s InSight Mars rover mission, and the impact of freezing temperatures on electronics was the reason for the end of Opportunity and Spirit’s Mars rover missions one.
“We believe it can survive,” said Dave Lavery, NASA’s Wit Mars Helicopter program director, but “every day is a gift.” JPL’s Wit team Director Teddy Tzanetos said recently: “Every Martian day has the potential to be Wit’s last day.”
Last month, Wit briefly lost contact with Earth due to degraded batteries, most of which were used to heat equipment. Two days later, NASA reconnected with the “Intuit”, but because the helicopter’s battery power was below 70% and the temperature continued to drop, in order to ensure power supply during the four-month winter, the “Intuit” helicopter was suspended at night. Onboard heater. Heaters are usually activated when the temperature drops below -20 degrees Celsius. The Wit team lowered the outside temperature to minus 40 degrees Celsius when the heaters were turned on after a low battery and a communications outage last month. But nighttime temperatures in Martian winter can drop to minus 80 degrees Celsius, raising the possibility of damage to the electronics inside the helicopter.
On Monday, NASA announced a sensor malfunction, delaying the 29th flight of Intent. This forced the mission team to upload a software patch and rely on another sensor to manage Intuit’s navigation algorithms.
Dust storms on Mars are also an unknown factor. In May this year, a team at the University of Houston studied four years of data detected by NASA sensors on Mars, showing that uneven solar exposure and the warming of Mars’ southern hemisphere have increased the possibility of large-scale dust storms, which can even cover the entire Mars. . Spring and summer are storm seasons on Mars, but as the northern hemisphere approaches the winter solstice, the likelihood of severe storms decreases, said Li Liming, an associate professor at the University of Houston. It’s important to note, however, that this study focused on Mars as a whole and didn’t consider any specific regions, and conditions inside Gerlow Crater may also be different than elsewhere on the Martian surface.
“It’s hard to say,” Li Liming said when asked if there would be more dust storms. “It’s hard to give a definite answer until we actually detect Jero Crater.”
Since the “Wit” helicopter stopped normal flight activities, the mission team will focus on transmitting data such as flight performance logs and high-definition images captured on the last eight flights, and upgrading the helicopter’s software. According to the Mars climate model, NASA expects a pickup in solar harvesting this fall, allowing helicopters to resume normal activities. By September or October, if Wit can regain the ability to heat its nighttime heating system, it will be able to resume normal flight to find places to store rock and soil samples for the Perseverance rover and explore the interior of Gerlow Crater. of a river delta.
Since it takes five to 20 minutes for a radio signal from Earth to reach Mars, Intent must use a fully automated flight control system and no sensors such as lidars used by ordinary helicopters and some NASA spacecraft. But the downward-facing camera could help Wit determine its position, speed and altitude.
Mission teams can perform system upgrades during winter outages. “If Witness survives the Martian winter and continues to operate later this year, the team is currently considering several flight system upgrades to increase the system’s robustness and improve the helicopter’s navigational capabilities,” Levery said.
Levery said NASA will test the automated hedging system in a known area. Wit’s first few flights were relatively smooth, but the role of the automatic hazard avoidance system is increasing as the helicopter will land in areas with more possible obstacles. The systems were originally developed in conjunction with Intent’s flight control system, but were not installed when it lifted off in 2020, Lively said.
Last month, researchers developing Wit’s flight-control system unveiled progress on an automated hazard avoidance system that can predict the best landing spot in unknown areas in an emergency. This emergency landing system will be useful on future NASA missions, such as the Dragonfly mission to send a quadcopter to Titan in 2027.
Like Wit, the Dragonfly drone, which will arrive on Titan in 2035, will fly alone millions of kilometers from Earth. But Wit arrived on Mars aboard the Perseverance rover, compared to the nuclear-powered Dragonfly drone, which would take off more than an hour after arriving at Titan, dropping its parachute and parachute in midair. Landing the shell to begin a two-year search for life.
The experience researchers gain with Wit may also help in future missions to Mars. NASA’s Ames Research Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory began work on the second-generation helicopter two years before Intent arrived on Mars. Leverly compared Wit to the Sojourn rover, the first to land on Mars. The Sojourner rover landed on Mars in 1997, and since then, almost every Mars surface exploration mission has carried the rover. “We hope Witness will do something similar, making helicopters a standard part of the mission,” Levery said.
NASA’s ROAMX program is designing improvements for next-generation helicopters, such as improved rotor blades, reduced drag, and the ability to fly about 6 kilometers with a scientific payload weighing about 1 kilogram. Last year, NASA principal investigator Haley Cummings said in a report on future Mars flights that ROAMX’s improvements to the rotor blades will be used in the Mars Science Helicopter, a 30-kilogram six-rotor helicopter. Ability to continue flying without losing one rotor.
Mars test vehicles have been in development for more than 20 years, ranging from helicopters shaped like lampshades to swarms of small drones, gliders launched from weather balloons, and tiltrotors that can switch between different flight modes. In the future, the Mars Helicopter may be used to explore areas beyond the reach of the Mars rover and eventually deliver tools and supplies for astronauts.
Scientists at Ames Research also envision an automated hangar that would protect the craft from harsh cold and dust, extending the design life by years. If the Mars Helicopter runs longer, multiple devices could form a network of machines for tasks such as exploring lava pipes, volcanoes or ice caps.
Lively believes that the most important mission of Intent will be accomplished during its maiden flight in April 2021. The 39-second flight proves that humans are capable of powered flight on another planet. “Every flight since then, and all the data we’ve collected from every successive flight, has helped humanity further refine that knowledge,” Lively said.
The first four flights only flew tens of meters at most, and each time did not exceed one minute. Ingenuity’s fifth flight lasted 108 seconds and flew 129 meters. The rover then began to assist the rover in exploring the Martian terrain and searching for possible life forms. At the request of the Perseverance rover science team, Wit took high-resolution photos of the rocks on the Forton Ridge at the bottom of Gerlow Crater, and flew over parts of the Séítah area to provide images and information on areas the rover could not reach,” Without the helicopter, it would have been impossible to capture this information,” Levery said.
In April of this year, “Wisdom” flew at a speed of 20 kilometers per hour, lasted for more than two minutes, and flew more than 700 meters in total, completing the longest and fastest powered flight on another planet. Later that month, Wit captured photos of the landing platform’s parachute and protective casing, which NASA hopes to use to ensure the safe landing of future spacecraft.
The upcoming first Martian winter on Witness was a challenge the team never imagined, but now that they’ve shown that flying helicopters on Mars is possible, it could make helicopters a viable option for future exploration, Lively said. The mission component of the celestial body. “We haven’t decided what our next destination will be,” Lively said. “But one thing I’m confident about is that there will be a next time.”
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