This week there are many news related to the world of space exploration that we can talk about, among them, without a doubt, it is especially striking that NASA has decided to incorporate into the mission March 2020 nothing less than a helicopter, which has been officially baptized with the name of mars-helicopter.
At the moment very little is known about this new and surprising maneuver carried out by NASA. Based on the statements made by several of those responsible for both the project and the United States Space Agency itself, we are talking about a prototype in which a group of highly qualified engineers has been working for more than four years and that, as a detail, it is much more similar to a drone that we can find on Earth than to a helicopter itself, at least in terms of operation.
NASA Announces Mars 2020 Mission Will Bring Helicopter To Mars
The idea behind the incorporation of this peculiar artifact to the mission is that if the mission reaches Mars and can be deployed, as they hope at NASA, it will be the first time that they can take pictures of the neighboring planet from a bird's eye view, something that at the moment we cannot do and for which an artifact has had to be designed and manufactured that must be able to function, and above all fly, in conditions that are very different from those we have on Earth.
Of course, before this peculiar drone can even take the first shot and send it to Earth, it must not only travel to Mars, but it must land in one piece and for this it will be installed in the rover that will give life to the Mars 2020 mission. If all goes according to plan, the drone will try until a maximum of five flights that will be progressive, to carry out this mission you will have a time limit of about 30 days.
This helicopter has been developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Going into a little more detail, tell you that this drone has been equipped with software that makes it completely autonomous and, as you are surely thinking, the main challenge it faces is to get all its architecture, of about 1'8 kilograms of weight, soar through the skies of Mars, a planet whose atmosphere is not as dense as Earth's, undoubtedly a challenge that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers seem to have faced with success.
Regarding the test flights, it has been established that in the first of them an attempt will be made for the drone to rise to 3 meters in height and remain in the air for no more than 30 seconds. Once it has returned to its base, it will recharge its batteries and proceed to make new flights with an increasing duration and altitude, although it is planned that at most it can fly during 90 seconds.
Until July 2020 we will not be able to see the first bird's-eye photographs of Mars
Undoubtedly, we are facing one of the most interesting challenges that NASA has faced, the same for which the different politicians of the American country have not hesitated in 'score the goal'in a different way, all of them agreeing that experiments like this must reach the classroom to serve as inspiration and motivation to the thousands of American children who want to be engineers and scientists in the future.
For now and as usual, except for a few images and a video where NASA itself shows us how it will move once the prototype reaches Mars, we will have to wait a long time, in principle and if everything goes well, at least until julio de 2020, date in which, for the first time, we should have available bird's-eye photos of our neighboring planet, a completely new perspective that will surely show us many more details that until now were unknown to us.