After the commissioning of Ingenuity, an American team plans to develop gliders intended for the study of Mars. Their machines, requiring no engine, will capture high-resolution images while studying the climatic and atmospheric processes of the Red Planet.
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[EN VIDÉO] Ingenuity’s historic flight to Mars Monday, April 19, 2021 will be remembered as the day when Ingenuity, a motorized and controlled craft, flew into the atmosphere of a planet other than our Earth for the very first time. Mars. And this video taken by the Perseverance rover, posted some 65 meters away, immortalized the moment. We discover NASA’s Martian helicopter rising about 3 meters above the ground of the red planet before landing about thirty seconds later. © NASA, JPL-Caltech, ASU, MSSS
It was a milestone in the history of space exploration: in April 2021, the very first powered flight of a machine took place, Ingenuity, on a planet other than Earth. The little helicopter barely two kilograms of Nasa had been taken on board the rover Perseverancewith the main mission of testing the capabilities of such a flight system in the Martian sky, characterized by a atmosphere very tenuous which, unlike our terrestrial atmosphere, greatly limits the lift of the machine. Due to communication difficulties between Earth and the Red Planet, Ingenuity was also experimenting with an autonomous flight system that did not require direct human intervention from Earth.
A real feat… but many drawbacks
Since its arrival on the surface of the Red Planet, Ingenuity has already successfully completed 29 flights, but the machine is greatly lacking inautonomy. Drawing its energy from solar panels, the small helicopter cannot stay in the tunes more than a few tens of consecutive minutes, and reached a maximum altitude of only 12 meters. Faced with these limitations, a team of scientists, in collaboration with NASA, is seeking to build a glider entirely devoid of an engine that would fly above Martian soil. According to the team developing the new concept, the absence of an engine makes it possible to promote the boating of scientific instruments on board the machine, by exploiting atmospheric gradients instead.
The idea of a compact glider, able to unfold
Due to the lack of a propulsion system, the team plans to develop a glider compact enough to be carried aboard CubeSats at relatively affordable prices. Once there, the machine would then be able to unfold – or to inflate – in order to be fully deployed. In a first prototype, the team developed a glider with a wingspan of 3.3 meters, equipped with various sensors navigation and various instruments to gather information about the Martian surface and atmosphere.
The scientists plan to launch their craft at altitude using a ball or an airship, which will then harness the updrafts of the Martian atmosphere to keep itself in the air. The glider would then have a much longer autonomy than Ingenuity, while being able to move in the first kilometers of themartian atmosphere, for a very low total energy cost. The team now hopes to receive funding from the American Space Agency, and possibly be able to see their machine join a mission to mars large scale in the near future.
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