But then once we realized we could actually get to the real Wright Brothers fabric, we jumped on it. Bob Balaram: I was looking for an artifact to put on the helicopter, and we had considered perhaps putting an American penny – there's one where it has the Wright Brothers Flyer on one side. Here’s Bob Balaram, chief engineer of the Ingenuity mission. In 1998, nearly four decades after he became the first American to orbit Earth, John Glenn carried a swatch of the fabric when he flew on Space Shuttle Discovery. Neil Armstrong brought some of the fabric, as well as a small piece of wood from the propeller, to the Moon in 1969. This isn’t the first time Wright Brothers fabric has flown into space. Members of the Wright family and Carillon Historical Park, home to the Wright Brothers National Museum in Dayton Ohio, provided the fabric. Narrator: Ingenuity was built to be as lightweight as possible, and yet the team added one extra item, under the helicopter’s solar panel, to provide an inspirational lift to their mission: a postage-stamp-sized bit of muslin fabric that had once covered a wing of the Wright Brothers’ 1903 aircraft. And you can do precision landing precisely where you'd like to land. On the helicopter side, though, you spend a lot more energy just to hover, but now you can hover. And if you have an anomaly in an aircraft and your motor kicks out, you could glide to safety. You don't have to spend as much energy going from point A to point B. But unless Perseverance was going to spend a couple of weeks paving a pebble-free runway for us, that was going to be a challenge.įixed-wing can be a lot more efficient, right? You can glide. Teddy Tzanetos: With most aircraft, you need a runway. Narrator: A fixed-wing aircraft, like the Wright Brothers Flyer and most planes on Earth today, wasn’t a practical design for the first flight on Mars. On the surface, when we were fully deployed on the ground, Perseverance was able to clearly drive over Ingenuity. The legs come off from that central structure, and then, of course, our solar panel on top. That's where all of our critical electronic components exist on Ingenuity. The electronics box, which is that silvery-colored box underneath the rotor blade system, that's where our computers are, that's where our battery resides. The blades themselves are 1.2 meters from tip to tip. Teddy Tzanetos: In terms of the dimensions, we have two counter-rotating coaxial rotor blades. Ingenuity was strapped to the belly of Perseverance during the journey to Mars, and so had to be small enough to fit easily beneath the SUV-sized rover. Ingenuity hitched a ride with NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, which sent the Perseverance rover to collect rock samples and look for evidence of ancient life. Narrator: The Ingenuity helicopter was a technology demonstration meant to test whether it was possible to fly a rotorcraft on Mars. And the fact that helicopters work to begin with is a testament to just engineering in general, and the beauty behind it. That's just true of all helicopters, right? All helicopters are precisely and carefully balanced pieces of art. Teddy Tzanetos: If there's some imbalance in your rotor system, because something broke or fell off, your entire rotor system will explode. It's incredibly fast, which means that when things go wrong, they go wrong catastrophically. You have these tiny mechanical parts spinning at 2,500 revolutions per minute. Teddy Tzanetos: Helicopters, in general, you're beating the air into submission from microsecond to microsecond. Narrator: Teddy Tzanetos, team lead for the Ingenuity mission, says the trickier nature of helicopters made the first flight on Mars even more perilous. Narrator: More than a hundred years later, in April 2021, another world saw its first powered, controlled aircraft flight when NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter lifted up into the skies of Mars. Narrator: On a cold and wind-swept December day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright flew a powered, controlled aircraft for 12 seconds – the first such flight in the history of the world. Your browser does not support the audio element.
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