- 4124 - MARS - helicopter explorations? After 63 Days of silence, NASA has restored communications with the Mars Helicopter. “Ingenuity” helicopter not only racked up several firsts for humanity, most notably the first powered flight of a craft on another planet, but it has provided both a new perspective and new scientific data to its operations team.
-------------- 4124 - MARS - helicopter explorations?
- It has consistently stayed ahead of its
companion on the Red Planet “Perseverance”, the rover was initially launched
from..
-
- With a 63-day silent period coming at the
end of the helicopter’s 52nd flight. The flight took the helicopter over a hill
out of the direct line of sight of Perseverance on April 26, 2023. It then took
the rover a full 63 days to get to the top of the hill, where it was able to
reestablish a connection with its airborne partner on June 28th.
-
- Since Ingenuity doesn’t have enough power
to beam a signal all the way back to Earth, or even a satellite orbiting Mars,
by itself, it has to relay all its communications through the much larger and
more powerful rover. Occasionally, the
operations team has to push past the limits of the rover’s effective
communication range for Ingenuity to find a safe patch of ground to land on.
-
- The helicopter can operate in flight
without directly interacting with Perseverance or its human operators back on
Earth. So it didn’t simply drop out of the sky once it crested over the hill
and lost its direct link. But the operators also can’t count a flight as
“successful” until they have reestablished communication and pulled the data
Ingenuity managed to collect, including whatever pictures it took. They
successfully did so for Flight 52 when they reestablished the connection.
-
- What took the rover almost two months to
traverse took the helicopter only around two minutes. Flight 52 covered 363
meters in about 139 seconds and was intended both to have Ingenuity capture
pictures of the terrain Perseverance would then traverse, as well as set the
helicopter up for future missions toward a rock outcropping that has caught the
interest of some of Perseverance’s mission scientists.
-
- Mars has sand dunes too. Attempts to interpret the patterns of dunes,
which are sand mounds frequently formed by aeolian (wind) processes and range
in size from small ripples observed on beaches to massive structures observed
in the desert.
-
- The researchers focused on patterns of dune
crestlines, which are the top of the dunes. Different dune crestline patterns
might appear as mundane features, but their formations are often the result of
a myriad of influences, including climate change, surface processes, and
atmospheric phenomena.
-
- The findings from
this recent study could provide researchers insights into environmental
variances not only on Earth, but other dune-harboring planetary worlds in our
own solar system. These currently include three of the four terrestrial
planets, Venus, Earth, and Mars; smaller bodies such as Jupiter’s volcanic
moon, Io; Saturn’s largest moon, Titan; and even dwarf planet Pluto.
-
- When you look at
other planets, all you have is pictures taken from hundreds to thousands of
kilometers away from the surface. Dune
interactions are defined as when their crestlines are near one another, and
it’s these interactions result in the dunes establishing a balance, or
equilibrium, with their surrounding environment.
-
- Researchers
analyzed changes in specific known environmental conditions, including sand
quantity and wind direction, using orbital images of dune field sites numbering
30 and 16 on Earth and Mars.
-
- For Earth, the
researchers flattened a dune field in China’s Tengger Desert to establish a
baseline prior to analyzing satellite imagery between 2016 and 2022 of how this
flat terrain evolved into large dunes as they slowly reached a state of
equilibrium with their surrounding environment.
-
- This was followed
by the team examining how wind conditions in the Namib Desert resulted in
increased dune interaction as the dunes migrated throughout a valley whose
landscape transitions from unrestricted to restricted then unrestricted
afterwards.
-
- Time-lapse images
of the Nili Patera dune field on Mars observed between 2007 and 2010 indicate
dune ripple movement and are an example of what scientists observed in the
Namib Desert on Earth for this study.
-
- For Mars, the
researchers used orbital imagery to discover similar dune patterns,
specifically near the Martian north pole where the researchers observed minor
amounts of dune interactions. This was due to the dunes reaching a state of
equilibrium with their surrounding environment, resulting in relative spacing
from each other and similar characteristics for both appearance and size.
- However, dunes
observed in slightly lower latitudes exhibited greater amounts of interactions
due to changing winds and local surface frost. But once these dunes migrate
closer to the north pole, their patterns settle out resulting in decreased
interactions.
-
- We have an upper
bound on the time that it takes for a given dune to adjust to changes in
environmental conditions, and that is the time it takes for a dune to migrate
by a distance of one dune length. We can
use this to diagnose recent changes in environmental conditions on planetary
bodies where we don’t have any information other than images taken from orbit or
radar.
-
- This data will
also assist in locating subsurface water ice that could be excavated by future
astronauts on the Red Planet.
-
- Other planetary
bodies besides Earth and Mars possess dunes that could be used to better
understand climates on those worlds, with one such world being Saturn’s largest
moon, Titan. In addition to its dunes, Titan is the only moon that possesses a
thick atmosphere, which makes it a target for astrobiology and the search for
life beyond Earth.
- This large moon,
Titan, was extensively investigated by
NASA’s Cassini throughout the 2000s and 2010s with the European Space Agency’s
Huygens probe touching down on Titan’s surface in January 2005. This made
Huygens the first spacecraft to land on a planetary body in the outer solar
system and the first landing on a moon aside from Earth’s Moon. While Huygens
only transmitted data and images back to Earth for approximately 90 minutes, it
provided scientists with a first-time, up-close look at one of the most intriguing
moons in the solar system.
-
- NASA’s upcoming
“Dragonfly mission” to Titan hopes to confirm these findings when it lands on
the moon’s surface sometime in the 2030s. With this mission, Dragonfly will
become only the second rotorcraft sent to another world—the first being NASA’s
Ingenuity helicopter on Mars—and will mark the first powered flight on any
moon.
-
- During its
multi-year science mission, Dragonfly will perform short flights around Titan
in hopes of determining its prebiotic chemistry and potential for
extraterrestrial life but should also provide scientists an up-close
investigation of its dunes, which have thus far only been observed from orbit.
-
What new discoveries about dune interactions on Earth and
other worlds will scientists make in the coming years and decades? Only time
will tell, and this is why we science.
-
-
August 20, 2023 MARS
- heliocopter explorations? 4124
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