Earth helicopter makes historic flight on the Red Planet
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More than a century since the Wright Brothers took to the skies, another American built flyer has gone where no machine has gone before-Mars.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory were celebrating Monday, April 19 as images of the Ingenuity helicopter hovering over the Red Planet reached Earth. The copter is the little brother of the Perseverance probe- the most advanced robotic explorer ever sent to the Martian surface- which landed on Mars Feb 18. The helicopter was attached to the belly of Perseverance but managed to get more than 200 feet away for its first experimental flight. At 3:34 a.m. eastern time or 12:33 Local Mean Solar Time (how Martians track time) the copter rose 10 fee into the air, hovered for 30 seconds before making a soft landing. Perseverance cameras captured the whole event and NASA released a video which was not available to JPL scientists in real time due to the distance between Earth and Mars. Engineers could not fly the copter with a joystick either, but Ingenuity was controlled by an autonomous program featuring algorithms that handled guidance, navigation and control systems. NASA officials were happy, to say the least. “Ingenuity is the latest in a long and storied tradition of NASA projects achieving a space exploration goal that was once thought impossible,” said Acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk in a press release. “We don’t know where Ingenuity will lead us, but today’s results indicate the sky-at least on Mars-may not be the limit.” The helicopter has since conducted two more flights going higher and staying aloft longer. To honor the Wright Brothers, a piece of the Wright Flyer-the world’s first powered airplane- was placed inside the copter. NASA administrators also named the rocky spot of Martian soil which served as Ingenuity’s landing pad Wright Brothers Field. NASA has plans to eventually send humans to the Red Planet and this mini flight was designed to test if an aircraft could fly in Mars’ very thin atmosphere. |
Video courtesy of NASA/JPL
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NASA probe looks for signs of ancient Martian life
Photo/video NASA/JPL
There’s nothing like a landing on a distant planet to make NASA engineers jump for joy.
And they did, Thursday, Feb. 18, breaking into applause as the Perseverance rover touched down flawlessly on the surface of Mars.
“NASA works, this is what NASA does, “exclaimed one observer in the control center of the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The landing was the culmination of a seven month, 300 million mile journey for the remote-controlled vehicle, which will spend almost two years trying to answer one of humanity’s most burning questions: did life ever exist on the Red Planet?
The United States has landed probes on the planet before, but NASA and its elaborate public information division went all out to promote this mission as a game changer.
A video hook up in the JPL command center broadcast the event live on television and online, complete with an animated mockup of the spacecraft descending through the Martian atmosphere.
The camera focused on engineer Swati Mohan as she rhythmically called out the distance to the planet’s surface every few seconds. The tension was reminiscent of the breathless moments before NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in July, 1969.
And finally the announcement was made: “Touchdown confirmed. Perseverance is safely on the planet Mars,’’ she said.
The anticipation of this latest robotic Martian mission is fueled by humankind’s fascination with the Red Planet and the possibility that life as we know it may have once existed on the fourth rock from the sun.
One billion years ago, Mars was hotter and wetter than it is today. The surface shows evidence that water was present, forming rivers and lakes that have since dried up. Today the planet is a cold, lifeless husk where temperatures plunge well below zero and the thin atmosphere teems with unbreathable carbon dioxide.
But, given that the planet once contained the building blocks of ancient life---water carbon and energy--scientists are eager to find out if fossilized life forms could be present in Mars’ soil.
Perseverance has landed in the Jezero Crater, which once was filled with water and adjacent to a river delta, the perfect place for life to have existed. The elaborate probe, which is as big as a sports utility vehicle, will extract soil, analyze it with a package of high tech instruments and transmit the data to earth.
It will also leave samples on the surface which will be picked up by another rover years later and, once the technology is perfected, a spacecraft will fly it back to earth for close-up analysis. Later this spring, engineers will also test the onboard “Ingenuity ”robotic helicopter to see if it can navigate the Martian atmosphere and act as a kind of scout during future manned missions.
The Martin surface is littered with present and former spacecraft which have made their contribution to America’s exploration of the planet.
In 1976, NASA sent Viking 1 and Viking 2 probes which transmitted photos for six years and conducted biological experiments but with inconclusive results. In later years, the rovers Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity transited the Martian surface sending back 100,000 photos before being damaged in dust storms.
Two other NASA spacecraft are now active on the surface. “InSight” is studying the planet’s interior and has already discovered that Mars is often wracked by earthquakes. “Curiosity,” launched in 2012, is located in the Gale crater, analyzing rocks from an ancient lakebed.
It’s unknown if life ever grew on Mars, but if NASA officials are to be believed, we will someday. Plans call for a manned mission in the next decade and tech titan Elon Musk has said that humanity must be a “multiplanetary species” to survive. He envisions more than a million people living on the planet by the end of the century.
And they did, Thursday, Feb. 18, breaking into applause as the Perseverance rover touched down flawlessly on the surface of Mars.
“NASA works, this is what NASA does, “exclaimed one observer in the control center of the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The landing was the culmination of a seven month, 300 million mile journey for the remote-controlled vehicle, which will spend almost two years trying to answer one of humanity’s most burning questions: did life ever exist on the Red Planet?
The United States has landed probes on the planet before, but NASA and its elaborate public information division went all out to promote this mission as a game changer.
A video hook up in the JPL command center broadcast the event live on television and online, complete with an animated mockup of the spacecraft descending through the Martian atmosphere.
The camera focused on engineer Swati Mohan as she rhythmically called out the distance to the planet’s surface every few seconds. The tension was reminiscent of the breathless moments before NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in July, 1969.
And finally the announcement was made: “Touchdown confirmed. Perseverance is safely on the planet Mars,’’ she said.
The anticipation of this latest robotic Martian mission is fueled by humankind’s fascination with the Red Planet and the possibility that life as we know it may have once existed on the fourth rock from the sun.
One billion years ago, Mars was hotter and wetter than it is today. The surface shows evidence that water was present, forming rivers and lakes that have since dried up. Today the planet is a cold, lifeless husk where temperatures plunge well below zero and the thin atmosphere teems with unbreathable carbon dioxide.
But, given that the planet once contained the building blocks of ancient life---water carbon and energy--scientists are eager to find out if fossilized life forms could be present in Mars’ soil.
Perseverance has landed in the Jezero Crater, which once was filled with water and adjacent to a river delta, the perfect place for life to have existed. The elaborate probe, which is as big as a sports utility vehicle, will extract soil, analyze it with a package of high tech instruments and transmit the data to earth.
It will also leave samples on the surface which will be picked up by another rover years later and, once the technology is perfected, a spacecraft will fly it back to earth for close-up analysis. Later this spring, engineers will also test the onboard “Ingenuity ”robotic helicopter to see if it can navigate the Martian atmosphere and act as a kind of scout during future manned missions.
The Martin surface is littered with present and former spacecraft which have made their contribution to America’s exploration of the planet.
In 1976, NASA sent Viking 1 and Viking 2 probes which transmitted photos for six years and conducted biological experiments but with inconclusive results. In later years, the rovers Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity transited the Martian surface sending back 100,000 photos before being damaged in dust storms.
Two other NASA spacecraft are now active on the surface. “InSight” is studying the planet’s interior and has already discovered that Mars is often wracked by earthquakes. “Curiosity,” launched in 2012, is located in the Gale crater, analyzing rocks from an ancient lakebed.
It’s unknown if life ever grew on Mars, but if NASA officials are to be believed, we will someday. Plans call for a manned mission in the next decade and tech titan Elon Musk has said that humanity must be a “multiplanetary species” to survive. He envisions more than a million people living on the planet by the end of the century.
Watch the touchdown
America returns to space from its own soil
SpaceX Capsule Dragon
May 20,2020
It was a day to celebrate the success of American technology and private enterprise. And who doesn’t like that.
The SpaceX two man crew in their Dragon space capsule, roared off the launch pad at 3:22 p.m. May 30, enroute to the International Space Station where it would dock and deposit astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley after a 19-hour flight.
A lot was riding on the success of the mission. Saturday’s launch was the first blast off of a space craft from American soil since NASA’s Space Shuttle program ended in 2011.
The flight was also a huge financial gamble for entrepreneur Elon Musk who wanted to prove that a privately-built rocket could provide the resources NASA needs to undertake two more audacious missions: returning humans to the Moon within this decade and landing astronauts on Mars sometime in the future.
I must admit to having kept my fingers crossed as the rocket roared upward. Like so many others, I remember seeing the Space Shuttle Challenger ascend skyward perfectly in 1986 only to watch it explore in a ball of flame seconds later, killing all the astronauts aboard.
Since the end of the shuttle era, NASA has relied on the Russian-built Soyuz system to shuttle its astronauts to the station. Over the years, the U.S. has paid the Russians a total of $80 million per seat for the flights. It is hoped that flying privately built American spacecraft will save the taxpayers a lot of money and encourage tech innovation on the process.
Sure enough, the rocket booster that pushed the capsule into the upper atmosphere was recovered after it landed on a drone platform in the ocean. SpaceX plans to reuse it in future flights.
Musk was ecstatic after the launch and well he should be. SPACE X was chosen over for this mission over rival aerospace firm Boeing because a freight version of the Dragon capsule has been successfully ferrying supplies to the space station. Boeing hopes to carry astronauts to the ISS in the company's Starliner capsule. But an uncrewed flight failed last year when the capsule became stranded in the wrong orbit and returned safely after circling the Earth for two days
Space X has also suffered from technical setbacks. A much larger rocket capable of carrying humans to Mars exploded on a SPACE X launch pad the day before, forcing engineers back to the drawing board.
NASA, which has an extensive public relations division, was happy too. The launch was available live on the Internet, with multiple cameras showing the capsule and its crew at every stage of the flight.
It was the most viewed Internet event ever, NASA communications administrator Bettina Inclan told a press conference.
“We’re still collecting the data but some of our metrics are saying that peak viewership for the joint NASA Space x Launch across all of our platforms was at least 10.3 million concurrent viewers-the most watched event we have ever tracked.”
However, that number represents only online viewers. The biggest audience for a space mission ever was the 600 million viewers who watched former Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren land on the moon with Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969, according to Space.com.
Whether the good feeling engendered by the mission will encourage the American public in the long run is anyone’s guess.
The launch took place during the coronavirus pandemic which has killed more than 100,000 Americans and caused an economic downturn not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
The recent killing of an African American man by Minneapolis Police has caused nationwide demonstrations along with nighttime violence and looting.
Space program supporters insist that reaching for the stars in times of turmoil is nothing new. The Apollo program took place during the 1960’s when American was torn by civil rights conflicts and the nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The moon landing provided a break from the grim daily news and improved public morale, they insist.
The SpaceX two man crew in their Dragon space capsule, roared off the launch pad at 3:22 p.m. May 30, enroute to the International Space Station where it would dock and deposit astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley after a 19-hour flight.
A lot was riding on the success of the mission. Saturday’s launch was the first blast off of a space craft from American soil since NASA’s Space Shuttle program ended in 2011.
The flight was also a huge financial gamble for entrepreneur Elon Musk who wanted to prove that a privately-built rocket could provide the resources NASA needs to undertake two more audacious missions: returning humans to the Moon within this decade and landing astronauts on Mars sometime in the future.
I must admit to having kept my fingers crossed as the rocket roared upward. Like so many others, I remember seeing the Space Shuttle Challenger ascend skyward perfectly in 1986 only to watch it explore in a ball of flame seconds later, killing all the astronauts aboard.
Since the end of the shuttle era, NASA has relied on the Russian-built Soyuz system to shuttle its astronauts to the station. Over the years, the U.S. has paid the Russians a total of $80 million per seat for the flights. It is hoped that flying privately built American spacecraft will save the taxpayers a lot of money and encourage tech innovation on the process.
Sure enough, the rocket booster that pushed the capsule into the upper atmosphere was recovered after it landed on a drone platform in the ocean. SpaceX plans to reuse it in future flights.
Musk was ecstatic after the launch and well he should be. SPACE X was chosen over for this mission over rival aerospace firm Boeing because a freight version of the Dragon capsule has been successfully ferrying supplies to the space station. Boeing hopes to carry astronauts to the ISS in the company's Starliner capsule. But an uncrewed flight failed last year when the capsule became stranded in the wrong orbit and returned safely after circling the Earth for two days
Space X has also suffered from technical setbacks. A much larger rocket capable of carrying humans to Mars exploded on a SPACE X launch pad the day before, forcing engineers back to the drawing board.
NASA, which has an extensive public relations division, was happy too. The launch was available live on the Internet, with multiple cameras showing the capsule and its crew at every stage of the flight.
It was the most viewed Internet event ever, NASA communications administrator Bettina Inclan told a press conference.
“We’re still collecting the data but some of our metrics are saying that peak viewership for the joint NASA Space x Launch across all of our platforms was at least 10.3 million concurrent viewers-the most watched event we have ever tracked.”
However, that number represents only online viewers. The biggest audience for a space mission ever was the 600 million viewers who watched former Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren land on the moon with Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969, according to Space.com.
Whether the good feeling engendered by the mission will encourage the American public in the long run is anyone’s guess.
The launch took place during the coronavirus pandemic which has killed more than 100,000 Americans and caused an economic downturn not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
The recent killing of an African American man by Minneapolis Police has caused nationwide demonstrations along with nighttime violence and looting.
Space program supporters insist that reaching for the stars in times of turmoil is nothing new. The Apollo program took place during the 1960’s when American was torn by civil rights conflicts and the nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The moon landing provided a break from the grim daily news and improved public morale, they insist.
Online planetarium show reveals South American observatories
Image driving up a dark, mountainous road to a place like no other.
It’s heaven for stargazers, where you can look up and see large portions of the Milky Way Galaxy with the naked eye.
For the world’s astronomers, it’s the gateway to the cosmos. Each night, teams of scientists take advantage of the ideal conditions to peer out into the universe with the latest high-tech visual and radio telescopes.
The story of this extraordinary system and the people who operate it is being told in “Big Astronomy, People, Places, Discoveries,” now being shown online by the California Academy of Sciences.
Financed by a grant from the National Science Foundation, “Big Astronomy” was created by the academy’s science visualization team headed by Ryan Wyatt, director of the Morrison Planetarium. Because the planetarium is closed due to pandemic restrictions, the show is being distributed on You Tube along with live interviews and other related events
Wyatt’s team travelled to Chile twice during 2019 to film at a series of high- altitude observatories run by the NSF and connected to research institutions in the United States.
Chile is the ideal spot for astronomy due to winds out of the Antarctic which create clear, cloudless skies in the surrounding mountains. The Atacama Desert, the world’s driest, is also ideal for radio astronomy and is home to the ALMA array which has been key to many astronomical discoveries.
Special emphasis was placed on the people who operate the system. To provide an accurate picture, the team conducted numerous interviews with everyone from astronomers to an employee who drives an enormous vehicle that moves radio telescopes.
“All the great discoveries that are made every day need a host of people,” Wyatt said. “There are a lot of careers involved. We wanted to tell the story of these people in Chile where that happens.”
Crew member Mike Schmitt was impressed by the relationships among the Chilean employees.
“I didn’t expect the community that was there.” he said. “It was like a family.”
Creating the show was a new challenge for the team which creates most its images with computer-generated graphics. Using the latest in SONY camera technology, the team shot live action of people and places along with time-lapse photography to illustrate astronomic phenomena. Wyatt said. Future shows will probably involve more photography, he said.
“We wanted to have more footage from the real world,” he said. “We wanted to climb that learning curve.”
Not that it was always easy. It rained when the team visited the world’s driest desert, and team members were limited by how long they could stay at the sites due to limits imposed by the system and the dangers of high-altitude exposure.
The Atacama site is at 16,000 feet and some crew members briefly suffered altitude sickness. Observatory employees have their blood pressure and heart rate checked regularly to avoid physical problems, Wyatt said.
Driving down the mountain roads could be challenging as well. An earthquake measuring more than 6.0 on the Richter scale hit after a day of filming at one mountain observatory, forcing the crew to get out of the vehicle and move large boulders that had fallen on the road.
“We realized there had been an earthquake and we had to get them out of the way,” Wyatt said.
“We thought there could be an aftershock so we kept going a dozen times before we got to an intersection. “
“Big Astronomy” will be shown live each Wednesday at 11:30 am on the show’s YouTube channel.
An interview with Dr. Luis Chavarria Garrido, Director of the Astronomy Program for the Chilean Government’s Ministry of Science, will follow the Nov. 11 show at 1 p.m.
Related videos are also on the channel and more information about other activities can be found on the group’s website bigastronomy.org.
It’s heaven for stargazers, where you can look up and see large portions of the Milky Way Galaxy with the naked eye.
For the world’s astronomers, it’s the gateway to the cosmos. Each night, teams of scientists take advantage of the ideal conditions to peer out into the universe with the latest high-tech visual and radio telescopes.
The story of this extraordinary system and the people who operate it is being told in “Big Astronomy, People, Places, Discoveries,” now being shown online by the California Academy of Sciences.
Financed by a grant from the National Science Foundation, “Big Astronomy” was created by the academy’s science visualization team headed by Ryan Wyatt, director of the Morrison Planetarium. Because the planetarium is closed due to pandemic restrictions, the show is being distributed on You Tube along with live interviews and other related events
Wyatt’s team travelled to Chile twice during 2019 to film at a series of high- altitude observatories run by the NSF and connected to research institutions in the United States.
Chile is the ideal spot for astronomy due to winds out of the Antarctic which create clear, cloudless skies in the surrounding mountains. The Atacama Desert, the world’s driest, is also ideal for radio astronomy and is home to the ALMA array which has been key to many astronomical discoveries.
Special emphasis was placed on the people who operate the system. To provide an accurate picture, the team conducted numerous interviews with everyone from astronomers to an employee who drives an enormous vehicle that moves radio telescopes.
“All the great discoveries that are made every day need a host of people,” Wyatt said. “There are a lot of careers involved. We wanted to tell the story of these people in Chile where that happens.”
Crew member Mike Schmitt was impressed by the relationships among the Chilean employees.
“I didn’t expect the community that was there.” he said. “It was like a family.”
Creating the show was a new challenge for the team which creates most its images with computer-generated graphics. Using the latest in SONY camera technology, the team shot live action of people and places along with time-lapse photography to illustrate astronomic phenomena. Wyatt said. Future shows will probably involve more photography, he said.
“We wanted to have more footage from the real world,” he said. “We wanted to climb that learning curve.”
Not that it was always easy. It rained when the team visited the world’s driest desert, and team members were limited by how long they could stay at the sites due to limits imposed by the system and the dangers of high-altitude exposure.
The Atacama site is at 16,000 feet and some crew members briefly suffered altitude sickness. Observatory employees have their blood pressure and heart rate checked regularly to avoid physical problems, Wyatt said.
Driving down the mountain roads could be challenging as well. An earthquake measuring more than 6.0 on the Richter scale hit after a day of filming at one mountain observatory, forcing the crew to get out of the vehicle and move large boulders that had fallen on the road.
“We realized there had been an earthquake and we had to get them out of the way,” Wyatt said.
“We thought there could be an aftershock so we kept going a dozen times before we got to an intersection. “
“Big Astronomy” will be shown live each Wednesday at 11:30 am on the show’s YouTube channel.
An interview with Dr. Luis Chavarria Garrido, Director of the Astronomy Program for the Chilean Government’s Ministry of Science, will follow the Nov. 11 show at 1 p.m.
Related videos are also on the channel and more information about other activities can be found on the group’s website bigastronomy.org.