Patents on the soles of your shoes...: Oh, patents! Oh, Ingenuity!

On schedule with no delays, Ingenuity ascended 10 feet above the Martian soil, hovered and turned 96 degrees, before landing on the same spot, on Mars, sending back a first picture (below) of its own shadow. Ingenuity is a small space craft helicopter drone that made history, on April 19, 2021, as the first controlled (un-manned) flight on another planet, some 180 million miles away from planet Earth. Ingenuity’s flight was also performed 118 years after the first airplane, flown by the Wright brothers, on December 17, 1903, took off and safely landed at Kitty Hawk, in North Carolina. This is the reason why the actual site on Mars, where Ingenuity took its first flight, is now named the Wright Brother’s Field. Indeed, Ingenuity’s flight is also a historic event on more counts than one.

Ingenuity landed on Mars, tucked inside the Perseverance Rover’s belly, on February 18, 2021. The small helicopter was deployed on April 3^rd, unfolding from a stowed frangi-bolted horizontal position, to a vertical position on the ground, from inside the rover’s belly, once the Perseverance hatch unlatched and dropped to the ground to release the space craft. Then, after the Perseverance Rover drove past the deployed space helicopter, uncovering it’s delivered payload, Ingenuity had to be solar charged and all systems verified. Finally, once in receipt of its first flight instructions, the little space craft was able to take off and land, completing its first flight (see video footage below). All of which pre-flight sequences were fired on Mars via remote-control from Earth, with a 20 minute delay.

However, even before Ingenuity could land or fly on Mars, the little space helicopter had to be built to specification that would resist the long voyage from Earth to Mars. In other words it had to be built to:

survive launching onto space with 80G* vibration load
survive a 7-month trip complete with radiation
survive 9G* vibration load upon entry in the Martian atmosphere

(*) gravitational constant

Ingenuity also had to be built to specification of the Martian atmosphere which is both much thinner than on Earth, and more oxidizing. The density of Martian atmosphere is actually 1% that of air on Earth. Martian gravity is also 38% that of gravity on Earth, which makes everything much lighter. Still, because of how thin the air is on Mars, Ingenuity had to be built very light. Thus, Ingenuity was designed to weigh less than four pounds (12 kgs), with blades each weighing 35 grams (equal to 6 quarters). The helicopter blades were designed stacked for stowing purposes. The blades rotate at 2300 to 2900 rpm (rotations per minute), which is 5 times faster than regular helicopter blades, rotating at 500 rpm.

Because remote control from Earth has a 20-minute delay, sequences of instructions are sent, which are then supplemented with data from a suite of sensors required for autonomous blade control, including data captured from accelerometer, gyrometer, camera, altimeter and inclinometer. Ingenuity is also equipped with insulated, rechargeable cellphone size batteries, operating to keep the space helicopter warm enough during the average -90 degrees F temperatures on Mars.

Ingenuity’s flight is an engineering mission designed to showcase that a drone-like space craft can fly outside of Earth’s atmosphere. Ingenuity has no scientific payload to carry out experiments. The purpose of the mission is to obtain engineering data in view of informing future designs. Ingenuity will also carry out longer, and more daring, missions on Mars, exploring places inaccessible to the Perseverance Rover, in search of telltale signs of biological life that may have existed, billions of years ago, on Mars.

Cheers to all the resourcefulness built into Ingenuity!