Ingenuity carries a black-and-white navigation digital camera and a 4,208 x 3,120-pixel color digital camera, akin to what could be present in a cell phone. Photographs are beamed by short-range radio hyperlink to Perseverance, which then relays them to certainly one of plenty of NASA spacecraft in Mars orbit, from the place they're transmitted again to Earth.
There’s nonetheless a really huge hurdle to flying on Mars: the environment. The air surrounding the planet is simply 1 p.c the thickness of Earth’s environment. With so little air to maneuver round, reaching raise on Mars can be very troublesome. The low gravity on the floor of Mars helps; it’s about 38 p.c that of Earth’s gravity. However even with that help, a automobile nonetheless can’t fly on Mars with the identical applied sciences we use to fly on our planet.
The primary flight will simply take a look at that the helicopter can get off the bottom and hover Three meters (10 ft) within the air. From there, every take a look at shall be harder than the final, culminating in a last flight that would carry the helicopter over 50 meters (160 ft) of Martian floor.
That testing helped form the ultimate design of Ingenuity. Throughout the first couple of flight assessments, the workforce discovered that the blades on the check helicopters saved flapping up and down. The tendency to flap occurs with Earth helicopters, too, for the reason that blades are lengthy and spindly. However the thick ambiance dampens that impact. The skinny Martian ambiance, however, doesn’t cut back that flapping.
To place the deliberate helicopter demonstration into perspective, NASA explains a helicopter on the Martian floor is already on the Earth equal of 30,480 metres in altitude – with the altitude report for a helicopter flying on Earth at about 12,192 metres. The Ingenuity group leveraged JPL’s Area Simulator, a 7.62-metre-wide vacuum chamber, for its flight testing. NASA explains the group created a vacuum to take away all the nitrogen, oxygen and different gases from the air contained in the Area Simulator’s cylinder after which injected carbon dioxide, the chief ingredient (about 95 per cent) of Mars’ ambiance.
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