A 54th flight is in the works.

The Ingenuity helicopter imaged on Mars on Aug. 2, 2023. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Update for 4:45 p.m. ET: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has now updated Ingenuity's flight log with statistics from the Mars helicopter's 53rd flight. This story has been updated to include those figures.

NASA's Red Planet helicopter took to the skies again after a three-month pause.

The Ingenuity drone flew on July 22 on Mars, achieving Flight 53. According to the the Ingenuity flight log, the helicopter fly horizontally and north across 468 feet (142 meters) of Martian terrain with air time of roughly 75 seconds. Ingenuity soared roughly 16 feet (5 meters) into the air and achieved a top speed of 5.6 mph (2.5 meters per second).

Ingenuity is already gearing up for another flight; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Twitter account already says 54 is in the works. "The #MarsHelicopter team is planning a short pop-up flight, with the rotorcraft reaching 16 feet (5 meters) for about 25 seconds," JPL officials wrote of Flight 54on Thursday (Aug. 3).

Anecdotal Twitter reports by keen-eyed Mars watchers, looking at the raw pictures coming in from the Red Planet, suggest the helicopter's 54th flight took place on or before Aug. 2. JPL has not yet released any details of the timing, duration, altitude, distance or speed of the flight on as of mid-morning EDT of Friday (Aug. 4).

The milestone 53rd flight happened roughly three months after the last excursion on April 26 when Ingenuity hopped behind rugged terrain and fell silent. That's because it couldn't reach Perseverance, the massive rover relaying communications to and from Earth, until the two vehicles came within view of each other on June 28.

Stills from NASA/JPL's Ingenuity Mars helicopter taken on Aug. 3, 2023. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Ingenuity has expanded its flight manifest by more than fivefold. Sent to Mars as the first powered, controlled aircraft on another world, the original plan called for only five flights in 2021. The helicopter has persisted with flair through communications shortages, cold weather, dusty conditions and other complications endemic to working on the Red Planet.

The drone's expanded mission now sees Ingenuity act as a scout for its partner Perseverance, which alighted on the surface in February 2021. Perseverance is on a hunt for ancient habitable conditions and is caching samples aside for a planned Mars sample return mission. Lightsaber-shaped samples of Red Planet material may ferry back to Earth in the 2030s, depending on funding and political will.

Quelle: SC

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Update: 10.08.2023

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Mars helicopter Ingenuity spies Perseverance rover during 54th Red Planet flight (photo, video)

By the standard of some of its previous flights, the most recent voyage of NASA's intrepid Ingenuity helicopter on Mars was nothing special. Over a period of 24 seconds, the small helicopter rose to an altitude 5 meters above the red planet's dusty surface and then touched back down in the same spot.

During some of its past flights, Ingenuity has flown for nearly three minutes at a time and traversed as far as 700 meters across Martian terrain. In fact, after landing on Mars more than two years ago as part of the Perseverance mission, the helicopter is arguably one of NASA's greatest exploration feats of all time.

Mission success for Ingenuity was completing five relatively short flights. However, since its first test flight in April 2021, the helicopter has exceeded all expectations by flying more than 50 different sorties across Mars and surviving long and dark winters.

Despite its brevity, however, Ingenuity's most recent flight on August 3 was nonetheless an important one for the helicopter. That's because, on its 53rd flight in late July, the helicopter automatically aborted a planned flight of 136 seconds after just 76 seconds and made an emergency landing.

After the flight, the helicopter's operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory determined that the premature landing came after images from Ingenuity's navigation camera did not match data from the vehicle's inertial measurement unit. In short, its on-board computer expected to see one thing, and it saw another.

"Since the very first flight, we have included a program called ‘LAND_NOW’ that was designed to put the helicopter on the surface as soon as possible if any one of a few dozen off-nominal scenarios was encountered," Teddy Tzanetos, team lead emeritus for Ingenuity, said. "During Flight 53, we encountered one of these, and the helicopter worked as planned and executed an immediate landing."

The helicopter's flight last Thursday was to gather additional data about the conditions that prompted the previous flight to end early. After the latest flight, Tzanetos said the helicopter team feels confident that Ingenuity can get back to flying more rigorous missions soon.

There was one other benefit of the short up-and-down mission. At the height of 5 meters above the surface, the helicopter snapped a photo of the Martian terrain that included Perseverance at the top of the frame—an image somehow both desolate and full of hope at the same time.

Quelle: arsTechnica

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Update: 11.08.2023

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Mars rover finds signs of seasonal floods

It's an exciting find because wet/dry cycles may be central to pre-life chemistry.

The newly described deposits (left) have their shapes highlighted in red at right.

The prodigious evidence for water on Mars has eliminated scientific debate about whether Mars had a watery past. It clearly did. But it has left us with an awkward question: What exactly did that past look like? Some results argue that there were long-lived oceans and lakes on Mars. Others argue that the water largely consisted of ice-covered bodies that only allowed water to burst out onto the surface on occasions.

The picture is further confused by the fact that some or all of these may have been true at different times or in different locations. Creating a clear picture would help shape our understanding of an environment that might have been far more conducive to life than anything that exists on present-day Mars.

A new paper describes evidence that at least one part of Mars went through many wet/dry cycles, which may be critical for the natural production of molecules essential to life on Earth—though they don't necessarily mean conditions in which life itself could thrive.

Putting a hex on Mars

The results come courtesy of Curiosity, the older of the two operational rovers on the planet, which is exploring a site called Gale Crater. About 3,000 Martian days into its exploration, the rover was at a site that dates to roughly 3.6 billion years ago, during Mars' relatively wet Hesperian period. And it came across what would be familiar to gamers as a hex grid: hundreds of hexagonal shaped rock deposits in the area of a few centimeters across and at least 10 centimeters deep.

These features are small enough that they'd be easy to overlook as simply another collection of wind-swept debris on the red planet. But up close, they're striking: large collections of hexagons that share sides, creating a regular grid. While there's some irregularity, the lines separating them largely form three-way intersections with equal angles between each line. And, in places where erosion has had different effects on nearby instances, it's clear that individual hexagons are at least 10 centimeters in height.

Similar shapes have been seen on Pluto, formed by convection of an icy surface. But these are far, far larger, able to be detected from a considerable distance from Pluto. The tiny size of the hexes on Mars is completely incompatible with convection. Instead, it has to be the product of mud drying out, creating cracks as the material contracts.

The water itself could either come externally, in the form of a flood, or via groundwater that soaks up to the surface. But again, the tiny size of these features is decisive, indicating that only the top few centimeters got wet, which is incompatible with a groundwater source. To form the regular, hexagonal shapes also means repeated cycles—experiments show that at least a dozen cycles are needed before you start to get the equal angles at the junction.

So, simply based on their shape, it appears that these hexagons are the product of repeated flooding. The chemistry backs this up. The rocks in the lines that separate individual hexagons are largely a mixture of calcium and magnesium sulfates, which will readily precipitate out of water as conditions get drier. These deposits will form harder rocks than the dried mud that comprises the bulk of the hexagons.

The researchers behind the work note that the apparently regular, mild wet/dry cycling is incompatible with a lot of ideas about the source of water in Mars' past, such as volcanic melting of ice deposits. Instead, it's consistent with mild seasonal flooding, although there's no way to tell if the cadence was tied to Mars' orbit given what we currently know.

Tiny building blocks

On its own, that's a nice result that helps constrain how we think about Mars' watery past, at least when and where these deposits formed. But the researchers note the implications are much larger than that, writing, "Environments subject to wet–dry cycling are considered supportive of, and perhaps essential, for prebiotic chemical evolution." For those unfamiliar with the term, "prebiotic chemical evolution" is a reference to the origin of life.

To explain why wet/dry cycles feed into that, we have to get into a bit of chemistry. Small building blocks of the complex molecules like those used by life on Earth appear to be very easy to form under a wide variety of conditions and have been detected in space and on bodies like asteroids. The challenge is figuring out the chemistry that takes these building blocks and actually builds something complex with them. In general, that means finding conditions where one or more building blocks merge to produce a larger molecule, which can then go on to react with additional building blocks.

Wet/dry cycling, as it turns out, can easily create conditions favorable for these sorts of reactions. Many of the building blocks contain the makings of a water molecule—an OH attached to one building block, and an H attached to another. This enables them to undergo reactions where the two building blocks merge, releasing a water molecule in the process. Drying conditions, which place a premium on the availability of water to keep things like salts dissolved, make these water-releasing reactions ever more favorable.

Of course, if things simply dry out, then the chemistry typically stops, leaving just a slightly larger molecule stranded in the sand. But repeated wet/dry cycles allow further reactions to take place, potentially building ever-larger molecules—and potentially washing those molecules to locations with the permanent water that was likely to be needed for the formation of things like cells.

It cannot be emphasized enough that we don't have any evidence that this did in fact happen, either on Mars or Earth. But the new findings suggest that there were at least some environments on Mars that were compatible with this idea.

Quelle: arsTechnica

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Update: 1.09.2023

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Ingenuity, the tiny Mars helicopter that could, will keep flying

Ingenuity, the tiny $80 million helicopter that has hovered over Mars 55 times since April 2021, will continue mapping the planet's surface as long as it can still fly, the former team lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told UPI.

Ted Tzanetos, whose team turned 4-pound Ingenuity into the little helicopter that could, now manages creation of a recovery helicopter to gather geological samples of Martian air, soil and rocks that the Perseverance rover has been collecting since landing with Ingenuity aboard on the Red Planet in February 2021.

"We've taken our old Ingenuity engineering model and we've pushed it to its limits," Tzanetos said in a phone interview. "We're in the process now of building our first full-scale prototype for chamber testing in September."

That will be one of many trials to ensure lightweight helicopters can assist retrieving Martian samples to be loaded into a rocket-propelled container ready to carry them to Earth.

NASA intends to launch a spacecraft called the Sample Retrieval Lander in 2028, which will settle on Mars as close as possible to the Jezero Crater and river delta, where Perseverance touched down.

The space agency's original plans involved using Perseverance in a primary role, transferring the geological payload directly to the retrieval lander. But that would mean a lot of maneuvering for the rover and its robotic arm, said Joshua Anderson, Ingenuity's team lead at JPL.

And a mobility problem affecting either system could spell disaster for the $2 billion mission.

Mars watchers may have noticed Ingenuity's seeming disappearance in April, after the helicopter surpassed expectations about its robustness, resiliency and reliability. Its successes gradually convinced managers they already had the prototype needed for the sample recovery helicopters.

After the mini chopper went silent April 26, controllers feared the worst -- that Ingenuity was disabled or destroyed or that the harsh Mars temperatures killed its batteries. While they were thoroughly pleased with its exceptional performance, it was hard for them to let go.

But then, on June 28, Ingenuity phoned home via the Perseverance rover -- the first word from the chopper since it went silent on the floor of the Jezero Crater after its 52nd flight.

But more drama lay ahead. The 53rd flight, on July 22, at 74 seconds, was far shorter than the planned 136 seconds to collect surface imagery of a rocky outcrop.

"Since the very first flight, we have included a program called 'LAND_NOW' that was designed to put the helicopter on the surface as soon as possible if any one of a few dozen off-nominal scenarios was encountered," Tzanetos said.

"During Flight 53, we encountered one of these, and the helicopter worked as planned and executed an immediate landing."

Flight 54 on Aug. 3, a 25-second up-and-down hop, was intended to determine what happened on the previous truncated flight and gave controllers confidence that Integrity had more life left in it.

"The Aug. 3 flight has proved that our baby is healthy and ready to keep flying," Tzanetos said. "That's important for the sample recovery helicopters because it is a safety net feature that now we know works. We know that the code execution task works well."

Then, Ingenuity flew for the 55th time Aug. 12, covering a wide bit of ground in its surveying mission.

"Ingenuity has now successfully flown on Mars 55 times! On its latest flight, the #MarsHelicopter flew 866 feet (264 m) for 143 seconds at a height of 32.8 feet (10 m)," JPL wrote via X, formerly Twitter, on Aug. 16.

The little helicopter has now covered 41,024 feet of ground and stayed aloft for nearly 98 minutes on its 55 flights, mission team members wrote on the chopper's flight log. And a repositioning 56th flight is imminent.

With their problem solved, engineers continue their work to show how helicopters could play a critical role in the sample recovery operations, Anderson said.

"Demonstrating coordination between Perseverance and Ingenuity remains a main goal," he said. That's how the Mars copters will play a primary role, rather than assist as backups.

New ones will be slightly larger and carry more sophisticated instruments than Ingenuity's, working in coordination with Perseverance to identify and verify the location of containers that the rover has been storing around the landing site.

The aircraft will pick up a single sample container at a time, deliver it to the Sample Retrieval Lander, fly back to get the next one, deliver it, and so on -- a task for both of Ingenuity's twin successors.

Most people, "even at JPL, wondered about flying a helicopter in an atmosphere with a pressure that's barely 0.7% of Earth," Anderson said. "There was a huge question of whether you could actually do something useful with a helicopter on Mars."

As it turned out, propeller blades spinning between 2,400 and 2,900 rpm did the trick. They are not just run-of-the-mill blades; they are made of carbon fiber specifically designed for the Martian environment.

Given Earth's greater atmospheric density, helicopter blades run between 225 and 550 rotations per minute, depending on aircraft shape and size.

If Ingenuity's propeller blades were to rotate in Earth's atmosphere, they would shatter within seconds. At a spin rate six times higher than that of standard helicopters, the edges would reach supersonic speeds, and the vibrations would be strong enough to cause obliteration.

NASA chose to explore the Jezero Crater's vicinity because billions of years ago, water was likely abundant and temperatures favorable to the presence of microscopic living organisms. And traces of microbial life can conserve for billions of years, especially in a fossilized state.

That would make for a historic finding.

It almost happened in 1997, when a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica showed possible evidence of past life. Even the White House became involved, with former President Bill Clinton announcing the discovery.

Microscope scans showed virus-size markers that could have resulted either from inorganic or organic chemical reactions. In the end, however, scientists acknowledged their investigations and results were inconclusive.

For the sample recovery mission, "We would arrive on Mars in 2030, and then it's a two-year cruise," Tzanetos said.

"So, launch in '28, arrive in 2029 or '30. Then, hopefully, the tubes would come back to Earth within two years of that, in 2032 or '33."

But it won't necessarily be easy, and the mission will require help from the European Space Agency.

"ESA is working with NASA to explore mission concepts for an international Mars Sample Return campaign," the agency said. "Several launches will be necessary to accomplish landing, collecting, storing and finding samples and delivering them to Earth."

It added: "Returning samples to Earth from Mars is expected to be the most complex robotic space flight campaign ever attempted."

Quelle: UPI

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Update: 2.09.2023

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Mars helicopter Ingenuity completes 56th flight

Ingenuity, the tiny helicopter that has far surpassed expectations on Mars, has completed its 56th flight, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab announced Thursday.

Ingenuity flew 1,334 feet, a little over a quarter of a mile, across the Martian surface last Saturday, JPL said in a statement. The tiny chopper flew at a maximum altitude of about 39 feet above the surface of the Red Planet.

"The goal of this flight was to reposition the helicopter," the statement reads.

The $80 million helicopter first flew at what has been called the Wright Brothers Airfield on the Martian surface in April 2021.

The helicopter was meant to demonstrate powered, controlled flight on another world for the first time, according to NASA. The test was meant to take place over a 30-Martian-day experimental window.

The technology demonstration was completed after three successful flights and Ingenuity transitioned to a new operations demonstration phase "to explore how future rovers and aerial explorers can work together."

NASA officials told UPI on Wednesday that the helicopter will continue mapping the planet's surface as long as it can still fly.

In total, the helicopter has now flown more than 42,369 feet across the surface of the planet, or a little over eight miles. The highest altitude it has reached is a little less than 60 feet above the surface of Mars.

However, Ingenuity went silent on April 26, leading its controllers to fear that it was destroyed by the harsh temperatures on the fourth planet from the sun.

But then, on June 28, Ingenuity phoned home via the Perseverance rover -- the first word from the chopper since it went silent on the floor of the Jezero Crater after its 52nd flight.

"Demonstrating coordination between Perseverance and Ingenuity remains a main goal," Joshua Anderson, Ingenuity's team lead at JPL, told UPI.

NASA is now working on creating more lightweight helicopters to assist retrieving Martian samples to be loaded into a rocket-propelled container ready to carry them to Earth.

Quelle: SD

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Update: 8.09.2023

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NASA’s Oxygen-Generating Experiment MOXIE Completes Mars Mission

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech