The Smithsonian would love to showcase the first vehicle capable of powered flight on another world, but with NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter still busy breaking records on Mars, the Washington, D.C. institution has opted for the next best thing.
Officials from NASA and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum celebrated the agency’s donation of Ingenuity’s aerial prototype to the museum’s collection at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, on Friday, Dec. 15. The full-scale prototype was the first to demonstrate that an aircraft could fly in the atmosphere of another planet during tests conducted at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
The prototype’s first free flight in a simulated Martian environment gave NASA the confidence to send Ingenuity to Mars. The helicopter and its accompanying Perseverance rover touched down in Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021.
“This has been something that has been at the top of my wish list ever since I heard that Ingenuity was flying with Perseverance,” Matt Shindell, curator of planetary science and exploration at the National Air and Space Museum, said in an interview with CollectSPACE. .com. “I really wanted to bring a piece of it to the museum at some point [the Mars Helicopter’s] “It is a development that will express both the process of developing this new technology and the representation of this technology itself in future exhibitions.”
The prototype’s flight on May 31, 2016, took place in JPL’s Space Simulator, a 25-foot-wide (7.6 meters) vacuum chamber. The Martian atmosphere was simulated by first evacuating the air in the chamber and then filling it with a small amount of carbon dioxide.
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The prototype was built to be the same size as the rotorcraft that flew to Mars, but differed in some key aspects of construction.
“The system was still a skeleton,” Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity’s project manager, said in a 2020 presentation as part of a workshop on planetary exploration robots. “There was this [infrared] He was tracking the guns to monitor the helicopter’s movement around the room, but the helicopter had no power system or computer. “It was really just an actuator, but it allowed us to take small steps forward.”
“So much creativity [was] to move the entire project forward, step by step, to prepare for the launch,” Tzanetos said. [the first flight of the prototype] The project’s ‘Yes!’ It was a big sign of approval. We can fly in a controlled manner in the Martian atmosphere. Let’s move on to the next step.”
The prototype was followed by more complete engineering models that integrated the systems required for what would become the Mars Helicopter. As of Friday, Ingenuity had completed 67 flights, 63 of which were devoted to finding the Perseverance rover’s path forward. His team is currently preparing to fly Ingenuity on its longest flight to date (2,717 feet (828 m); this is significantly farther than the current distance record of 2,310 feet (704 m), set on the 25th flight in 2022.
Ingenuity’s 68th flight is targeted to reach a top speed of 22.4 miles per hour (36 km/h), which would break the speed record set last October. The jump will last 147 seconds and take the helicopter to a maximum of 33 feet (10 m) above the Martian surface.
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As Ingenuity continues to fly, its prototype will begin to undergo preservation and processing so that the Smithsonian can properly store and display it for years to come. It has not yet been decided where it will be exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum.
“Except in rare cases, what is sent to Mars does not return to us,” Shindell said. “So we tend to collect prototypes and engineering models that are developed in the lead-up to a successful spacecraft mission, which then allow engineers to solve problems and improve the technology as they go.”
“We are happy that they can replace the spacecraft that were flown, but it is the fact that they played such an important role in the development of the flying mission that determines their importance to us as curators and why they belong in the museum collection.” said. “This prototype is a really great example of why these unknown articles are historically important and should be preserved by museums.”
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