In a presentation about future flights to Mars, last year NASA principal investigator Haley Cummings said rotor blade refinements uncovered by ROAMX will be incorporated into the Mars Science Helicopter, a 66-pound hexacopter with six rotors that could lose a rotor but continue to operate. ![]() NASA’s ROAMX project is designing improvements to be incorporated into the next helicopter, like changes to the rotor blades that reduce drag and could enable it to carry a scientific payload that weighs about 2 pounds a distance of about 4 miles. “We’re hoping that Ingenuity will do a similar sort of thing, that this will become a standard part of the mission toolkit,” he says. Virtually every surface mission since then has carried a rover. Lavery compares Ingenuity to Sojourner, the first rover sent to Mars, which landed in 1997. NASA Ames Research Center and JPL started work on a second-generation helicopter two years before the first reached the Red Planet. Lessons learned from Ingenuity may also help plan future missions to Mars. Unlike Ingenuity, which hitched a ride to Mars under the belly of Perseverance, Dragonfly will take flight a little over an hour after reaching Titan, detaching from a parachute and aeroshell for midair flight to start a two-year, nuclear-powered mission to search for life. Like Ingenuity, the Saturn drone, which arrives in 2035, will take flight millions of miles from Earth, and must operate without human assistance. These kinds of emergency landing systems will play a role on future NASA missions like Dragonfly, a 2027 mission to send a quadcopter to Titan, the moon of Saturn. Last month, JPL researchers who helped create autonomous flight systems for the Mars helicopter shared advances in AI for predicting the best place to land in an unknown area during an emergency. Lavery says these systems were developed together with Ingenuity’s initial flight system, but not as part of the version launched from Cape Canaveral in 2020. Conditions for the helicopter’s initial flights on Mars were relatively harmless, but the utility of active hazard avoidance AI is increasing as the helicopter attempts to land in areas with more potential obstacles. “If Ingenuity is able to continue operations later this year, after getting through the Martian winter, the team is currently considering several flight system upgrades that would increase system robustness and/or improve the navigation capabilities of the helicopter,” Lavery wrote in an email to WIRED.įor example, Lavery says NASA will test its autonomous hazard avoidance system for known areas. Improvements to these systems could be transferred during the helicopter’s winter downtime. A single downward-facing camera helps Ingenuity determine position, velocity, and altitude. Because it takes anywhere from five to 20 minutes for a radio signal from Earth to reach Mars, Ingenuity must use fully autonomous flight systems and operate without sensors like lidar used by helicopters on Earth and some NASA spacecraft. I recommend watching the Propel Atom 1.Although Ingenuity’s first flight has been dubbed a “ Wright Brothers moment on another planet,” the site of the first flight is now called the “Wright Brothers Landing Field,” and Ingenuity even carries a strip of the muslin fabric used to wrap the wings of the Wright Brothers’ 1903 plane, Ingenuity is not a plane-and it cannot be flown by a human. As soon as we get a sunny day, we’re testing this little guy on an open field. There are 4 extra blades that came in the package but I did not hesitate to order more spares immediatly as I knew we were going to play with this some more. The blades stayed intact but had to bend one of the plastic propellers back in place – thankfully it didn’t snap. We had a total of probably 20 minutes of flight time (not continuoisly) and several indoor crashes. We also agreed that we weren’t going to try any stunts until we’ve gained a good handle on how to hover the Drone nicely and fly around in a controlled and stable manner. Not to my surprise, he crashed it several times (so did I admittedly) until we finally talked about strategy and how sensitive the controls were. We waited till the red LED light on the USB charging cable turned On indicating that the Drone was fully charged and prepared for his first flight. We unboxed it, read the instructions, charged the Mini Drone and installed fresh batteries in the remote. My wife got this for my 7-year-old boy as a birthday gift. ![]() The Atom 1.0 Micro Drone by Propel RC is a great starter drone or any kid (ages may vary) or adult.
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