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NASA’s Mars helicopter experiment worked so nicely they had to do it twice.
When NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech in Pasadena landed its rover nicknamed Perseverance on the surface of Mars one year ago, it carried a prototype solar-powered helicopter named Ingenuity. The interstellar helicopter has since performed 29 flights on Mars following its historic first takeoff last April, providing scientists with valuable and previously never seen drone footage of the planet.
NASA has been sending four wheeled robots or rovers to Mars since it first landed the Sojourner in 1997. This new mission has two goals: exploring one of Earth’s closest neighboring planets and also gathering samples to take home for analysis – part of the JPL’s Mars Sample Return Program.
NASA said this week that the Perseverance Rover is currently collecting samples near Mars’ Jezero Crater. But the JPL just decided the success of the early Ingenuity flights indicated it could do more testing and sample collection from the air.
Partnering with the European Space Agency, NASA and the JPL will swap the planned Sample Fetch Rover for two helicopters that are based on Ingenuity’s design.
“There are some significant and advantageous changes to the plan, which can be directly attributed to Perseverance’s recent successes at Jezero and the amazing performance of our Mars helicopter,” NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said in a statement Thursday.
The new mission is still in its conceptual design phase. In simplified terms, here’s how the revised plan will go down: NASA’s Sample Retrieval Lander will land on Mars, carrying a small rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle. The existing Perseverance Rover and new helicopters will collect samples of Martian soil and rocks and then put them into sealed tubes that the Mars Ascent Vehicle can ferry back to Earth, where scientists will eagerly be awaiting their arrival.
The Sample Retrieval Lander won’t launch until at least summer of 2028, NASA said. We can’t expect to see samples from that upcoming mission back on Earth until at least 2033.
That lengthy commute is a small trade-off considering the valuable information about the Red Planet that NASA could extract from the samples. It could go a long way towards, say, figuring out if we really could grow potatoes on Mars and sustain life on the planet.
Ingenuity was supposed to be just a test vehicle, but it outperformed the JPL’s expectations. It has proven to NASA, and the larger world, that Mars helicopters are actually a viable way to gain valuable insights about Mars and—perhaps—our other neighbors in the solar system.
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For the first time ever, NASA has captured video of a rover landing on the surface of Mars, plus audio of the wind whistling past it after the landing.
The stars of the show are NASA's Perseverance rover and the hundreds of scientists and engineers supporting the mission to Mars at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other institutions around the world. But Amazon Web Services is playing a key role in making all those gigabytes of goodness available to the world.
More than 23,000 images, amounting to 30 gigabytes of data, were gathered during the final minutes of Perseverance's journey to Jezero Crater on Mars, said Dave Gruel, camera suite lead for entry, descent and landing at JPL.
A couple of cameras looked up from the spacecraft's back shell to document the deployment of the parachute. Another camera looked down from the "Sky Crane" descent stage to watch the rover's touchdown. Meanwhile, cameras on the rover looked up at the Sky Crane and looked down and out to survey the surrounding terrain.
All those perspectives were put together in a three-minute video that documented the milestones of the descent, from the time the parachute popped open to the rover's dusty touchdown. At the end, video from the rover shows the descent stage flying away to its safe disposal, powered by a set of thrusters built by Aerojet Rocketdyne.
"It gives me goosebumps every time I see it," Gruel said at today's news briefing, conducted under COVID-19 conditions at JPL in Pasadena, Calif. "I hope everybody kept their hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times while it was in motion."
That's not all: A modified off-the-shelf microphone was hooked up to the rover, with the intention of recording the sounds of the air whistling past during the descent.
No sounds were recorded as the rover dropped, but once Perseverance had settled on its landing spot, the microphone captured the rumble of Martian wind gusts.
Gruel said the characteristics of the sounds suggest that the gusts were blowing at about 11 mph (5 meters per second).
As the mission proceeds, the microphone could capture the crunch of rocks beneath the rover's wheels as they roll, deputy project manager Matt Wallace said.
Both the video and the audio broke new ground for NASA: Although there's been descent imagery from past space odysseys, including the Apollo moon missions and the Mars Curiosity rover mission, this was the first time a video camera clearly captured the moment of touchdown on another planet.
As for the audio recordings, Soviet landers have previously recorded sounds on the surface of Venus, and NASA's Mars InSight lander has documented wind vibrations using an air pressure sensor. But Perseverance is the first to pick up the sounds of Martian winds directly with a microphone.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for space science, said this is "how it feels to make history."
"The video of Perseverance's descent and landing, and the amazing panorama and the first wide landscape shot of Jezero Crater seen with human eyes, and the first Martian sounds are the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit," Zurbuchen said.
Releasing the raw images, video and the sounds should fire up the imagination — not only for future billion-dollar space missions, but for creative crowdsourcing here on Earth.
"Please go take a look at these data and play with them, especially those of you … that have signed up for our educational campaign," Zurbuchen said. "What can you find in these pictures? And who's going to compose the first piece of music with actual Mars sound?"
During the first couple of days of the mission, there was a fair amount of grumbling about the paucity of pictures released by the Perseverance team. But the situation changed dramatically today: The tally of raw images in NASA's Perseverance gallery jumped from less than 200 to close to 5,000 over the course of just a few hours.
Amazon Web Services said NASA is using its cloud computing platform to process image data from Mars, and to power NASA's Mars mission website. "The website will be able to scale up to meet demand at any given time, with millions of visitors expected at peak times," AWS said.
The navigation cameras on NASA's Perseverance rover captured this view of the rover's deck on Feb. 20. This view provides a good look at the PIXL instrument on the rover's stowed robotic arm. (NASA / JPL-Caltech)
The plutonium-powered Perseverance probe is only four days into a mission that's expected to last at least two Earth years, and most likely much longer. The $2.7 billion mission's primary goal is to identify and store up samples that could hold evidence of past life on Mars. NASA plans to bring such samples back to Earth in about a decade for detailed lab study.
Leaders of Perseverance's science team say they're already seeing intriguing geological features to dig into, including an assortment of "holey" rocks that could be volcanic in origin.
"If they are volcanic rocks, that is enormously important to us, because it potentially provides an opportunity to get a really nice radiometric age, or an absolute date, if a sample like that comes back to Earth," deputy project scientist Ken Williford said.
This article first appeared on GeekWire.
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