Why NASA Made a Helicopter for Mars

[narrator] It's not easy designing a new helicopter,

especially if that helicopter

has to survive a ride on a rocket,

deploy from the Perseverance Rover

and be controlled by these guys, 200 million miles away.

NASA's Ingenuity is the first machine aerial vehicle

to fly on a planet outside Earth.

It's more than 500 parts

are all designed to meet the challenges of flying on Mars.

Ingenuity has been so successful in the past month

that it's preparing for even more flights.

So, why did NASA decide to design a helicopter for Mars?

To prove that we can, it's the simple answer.

Talk to JPL engineer, Teddy Tzanetos,

to learn about

the challenges of designing a helicopter for Mars.

There is no manual, there's no instruction sheet,

NASA hasn't done this before.

It's an evolution of baby stepping

and tackling the next biggest technical challenge

each step, along the way.

In the month of Ingenuity and getting our flights

has been, on one side of the screen putting up our models

and saying this is what we think a helicopter should do

based off of everything we've done here on Earth,

and then on the right side of the screen

we put up the actual results and we say,

okay, this is what Ingenuity actually did.

And you line them on top of each other

and it's an almost perfect match.

[Flight Controller] ...on the parachute,

we're coming up on...

[narrator] One of the biggest flight challenges

engineers had to face were the aerodynamics of Mars.

The Martian atmosphere

is 1% the density of Earth's atmosphere.

You know, you move your hands around here on earth

you can kind of feel the hair on your hands moving around

as a result of...

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, right?

You feel you your action pushing the wind.

Imagine that 1% of that sensation on your hand,

that's how little air we're talking about.

[narrator] Flying on Mars is

like flying a helicopter at 100,000 feet on Earth.

So there's not a lot of air to produce thrust to move up.

So, to give yourself the easiest job possible

you want to keep your vehicle light

and that kind of means around the area of two kilograms

[narrator] Ingenuity weighs less,

than your domesticated cat.

The blades have to be compact enough to fit into the Rover,

but also fast enough for lift.

That means that your blades and your spin

around, you know, we're talking about 1900, 2200 RPM,

that's super fast.

[narrator] Compare that

to the rotation permitted of helicopter blades

here on Earth, which spin between 400 to 500 RPM.

Most people are familiar with a single rotor spinning

and then a tail rotor that counteracts your, torque.

Those two rotor systems, if they counter rotate,

they can cancel out that [indistinct] instead

and then can also produce thrust on top

of each other and still give you positional control.

[narrator] And it's first five flights.

Ingenuity is flown a combined 91 feet

which altogether would be

about the height of an eight story building.

Another surprising aerodynamic challenge was low gravity.

It's actually nice that the is less

on the surface of Mars.

It's about one third, what we have here on earth

and that makes it easier

for the vehicle to actually get up off the surface.

That makes it difficult for you here on this

for here on earth though, because how do we test that?

We don't have anti-gravity technology with

there's no way to cancel out the gravitational field.

[narrator] So engineers built a gravity offload system to

replicate the low gravity.

During the testing phase.

You can think of it like a high-tech fishing reel.

We attach that several stories above the helicopter

in our vacuum chamber.

And there's a control loop that many, many times a second.

It just senses how much torque it feels.

That torque over a fixed radius pulley

gives you a tension on the line.

And we just have a controller that's dialing

in that torque to give you a fixed tension and

that fixed tension cancels

out the difference in gravity between Earth and Mars.

Engineers also had to make sure

that Ingenuity was stable enough to take

off and land without falling over.

When after we first landed

on the surface was for the Ingenuity team, was to do our

our kind of flight zone selection.

That whole site selection process was very particular

about the number of rocks at certain distances

apart as different sizes of rocks to give us the best

you know, location to, to fly on.

And what about those infamous Martian dust storms?

Hollywood tends to exaggerate

a little bit the capabilities

of Mars windstorm because of that 1% density.

There's not a lot of matter hitting you, right?

And there's not a lot of momentum being imparted upon you

because of that.

So, so we're not too concerned

about a dust storm coming and knocking us over

Not only did engineers need to make Ingenuity fly.

They needed to design a way to keep the craft

from freezing every night.

A lot of no pun intended energy, but a lot

of time was put into designing the thermal management system

for engineering.

Mars can get to negative 130 degrees, Fahrenheit

and engineers, have to protect the brain of Ingenuity

which holds his camera, computing boards and batteries

the solution, wrapping the box

that holds the Ingenuity's brain

with two layers of this shiny golden material.

We have our metallized polyamide film,

that's our inner insulation layer.

And then we have an outer insulation layer

by preventing those circulation currents from flowing.

You minimize how much heat winds up leaking out

to the outside surface.

And you keep your precious components warm

throughout the very, very cold nights

Beyond just keeping the battery warm engineers

also needed to keep the battery charged.

The solution was a solar panel.

That's our font of energy.

That's where Ingenuity, recharges a rectangular panel.

And it's about a foot long.

You know, I would say a little less than a half a foot wide

whenever photons are hitting the surface of the solar panel

we're, we're taking those in and we're, we're

we're shoving them into the battery.

You'll see three rows of solar cells on top.

And those three rows all combined to give us

all the energy that we need to charge soul after soul

One, single cell of a battery is

about half the life of a cell phone battery.

And that's what we use,

every single flight every single day

every single moment to keep ourselves warm

to run telecom, to, to

to speak back with, you know,

mission control here on the ground.

And finally engineers had to figure out how to

control the helicopter from roughly 200 million miles away.

So we have our solar panel with our

little telecom antenna on top, and that is our link

back to mission control here at NASA JPL,

all of the data and commands sent here from the ground.

We uplink that to the orbiters orbiters, then relay that

to the Rover.

And then the Rover sends that to our base station

which then sends it back over to, to the helicopter.

Everything that Ingenuity does on Mars

is done autonomously by code and algorithms

and the engineers at GPL, wait for it's transmitted data

to see if their calculations were correct.

That's what they're doing here.

This is [indistinct].

You've pulled in data products from Mars, 2020.

Little insider baseball here,

is depending on the size of the data.

We, we sometimes know how things went.

We're sitting there at our stations waiting

for the first bits and then the last bits to

to hit the deep space network

to hit the receiving stations here on earth

to then get forwarded over to JPL.

Once, once we verify data's down and our pilot has confirmed

that we flown, then we can celebrate and say yes.

Now we know for sure.

[applause]

However, there are even some challenges

that you can't prepare for.

After we were dropped.

The Rover, took some very nice images of Ingenuity

and specifically of the solar panel.

And we noticed that, yeah, there was definitely

some dust there that we think may have accumulated either

after we were deployed.

And we're looking right now, we're doing the

the data mining and analysis.

One of the cool aspects of having all this data is you

can go back looking at how did the solar panel do

before flight one, before we really started shaking

the system and then after flight one, how does that change?

That is definitely one of the interesting aspects

of having an aircraft is that you're not physically static.

You maybe can use your propulsion system to try and clean

off your solar panel, but, but we'll see work to go

When Ingenuity flies again, it'll kick

off its operational demonstrations phase where

the craft will capture images

and scout above the marsh and terrain

Proven that humanity can fly on Mars.

We're trying to push that envelope even further

and learn as many lessons as we can.

Eventually parts will fail.

It's going to happen, right?

We are using consequences.

We are not as reliable as the Rover.

We are not as reliable as a class A mission

that's designed to survive

months and months and months, right?

So it's going to happen.

We're ready for it.

We'll look back to these three points that, you know

we flown, we got the data down and it's not a fluke.

We did it 5 plus however many we're lucky enough to do

in the operational demo.

So, you know, as happy as can be

it's been a dream come true.

And we're just trying to continue

that as long as we can,

when the operational demonstration is over

wherever she touched us down for the last time that that's

that'll be where she stays. In terms of the longterm future.

She's already home.

That, that that's, that's where

where Ingenuity is meant to be.

I can't wait to see what comes with this and, and

and what you know, humanity can do as a result of this.

You know, the idea

of being able to carry meaningful science payloads

in the future

maybe one day helping the first astronauts that land

on the red planet.

And we're, we're excited

that Ingenuity has now enabled that.