Tag: Ingenuity Helicopter

Space News for November 2021.

Lot’s going on this month in both manned and robotic spaceflight, so let’s get to it.

In manned spaceflight the big news this month was the scheduled crew rotation on the International Space Station (ISS) between Commercial Crew 2 and 3 using Space X’s crew Dragon capsule. It speaks to the efficiency of Space X as a provider of manned access to Low Earth Orbit (LOE) that the media had to look hard for a couple of small problems in order to have something to talk about in what is becoming a routine operation.

Space X Dragon Capsule carrying NASA’s Crew 3 arrives at the International Space Station. (Credit: Space News)

The first problem was simply a bit of bad weather at the Kennedy Launch Center in Florida that caused the takeoff of the Crew 3 mission to be delayed more than a week from its initial date of the 31st of October to the 10th of November. Once the weather cleared however the Falcon 9 rocket, carrying three NASA astronauts and one from the European Union, roared to life shortly after 9PM EST. After a flawless flight of about 22 hours the capsule docked successfully at the ISS where the four astronauts will now spend the next six months. Crew 3 is now the fifth manned mission for the Hawthorn California based Space Corporation who has now sent 18 people into space without any serious problems.

Space X Mission Control in Hawthorn California. It’s from here that all Dragon missions, manned and unmanned are directed. (Credit: CNN)

There was also one little problem with the return flight of the Crew 2 mission and the press tried to get some fun out of it. Back in September the Space X Inspiration 4 tourist flight ran into a little difficulty with the Dragon capsule’s toilet, apparently the fan stopped working intermittently and during the three-day mission the toilet leaked a bit of urine. Space X quickly made some modifications to the Crew 3 capsule before it’s flight but the Crew 2 capsule was already in LOE docked at the ISS so when Crew 2 came back to Earth they were ordered to wear diapers during the day long return flight, just in case.

The toilet aboard the Crew Dragon capsule doesn’t allow for a great deal of privacy! (Credit: The New York Times)

Before you start feeling sorry for the Crew 2 astronauts it’s worth pointing out that back in the early days of spaceflight during the two man Gemini Program the Gemini 7 crew of Frank Borman and Jim Lovell spent a then record 14 days in space without any toilet of any kind. The two astronauts admit that by the time they splashed down they smelled pretty bad. That was the norm for all of the Gemini missions. Even today if an astronaut is going outside for a 6-8 hour EVA they will were a diaper.

Two weeks living in a capsule with the volume of a phone booth. Astronauts Borman (r) and Lovell (l) would have loved to have had a leaky toilet! (Credit: NASA)

But the Crew 2 mission did come to a successful completion at 10:33 PM EST on November 9th. The four astronauts splashed down in the gulf coast of Florida after more than 200 days in orbit. Again, the fact that all the press could find to talk about was a leaky toilet is an indication of just how routine spaceflight into LOE has become.

Recovery of the Crew 2 Dragon capsule in the waters off Florida. (Credit: Space.Com)

And while the Crew 3 astronauts were settling in to their new home in LOE on Mars the little helicopter that could is still going strong. The Ingenuity helicopter, the first human built aircraft to fly on another planet, has now completed its 13th flight, after only being expected to carry out five. This latest flight lasted a full 160 seconds and according to a space agency spokesman “stands out as one of Ingenuity’s most complicated.”

Snapshot taken by the Perseverance rover during Ingenuity’s 13th flight on Mars. (Credit: YouTube)

So far the little helicopter has been able to keep up with the Perseverance rover as it treks across Mar’s Jezero crater, the aircraft acting as an aerial scout for the bigger rover. Just how much longer the little helicopter will be able to perform is unknown but Ingenuity has already gone from being just a technical demonstration to an integral part of the Perseverance rover’s mission to explore Mars.

Working as a team the Perseverance Rover can examine any interesting rocks formations spotted by the Ingenuity helicopter. (Credit: Business Insider)

And speaking of technical demonstrations the DART spacecraft was successfully launched aboard a Space X Falcon 9 rocket from Vanderberg Air Force Base in California at 1:20 AM EST on the 24th of November. The DART or Dual Asteroid Redirect Test is a NASA mission designed as a first test for possible techniques to defend our planet against an impact from an asteroid.

Launch of the DART spacecraft aboard another Space X Falcon 9 rocket! (Credit: SciTechDaily)

As I discussed in my post of 28th December 2019, the DART spacecraft will travel to the asteroid Didymos, which is orbited by a much smaller asteroid called Dimorphos. The object of the mission is for the DART spacecraft to literally slam into Dimorphos at more than 20,000 kph and hopefully deflect the asteroid’s orbit enough to be observed by Earth based telescopes.

The Mission of the DART spacecraft is to crash head long into an asteroid in an effeort to change the asteroid’s path. (Credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Labouratory)

The impact is currently scheduled to take place in late 2022 although determining just how much the smaller asteroid’s path has been changed by the collision may take years to measure. NASA is presently tracking some 2200 asteroid’s that could potentially strike the Earth so that hopefully if any of them are headed our way we would have many years warning. In that case only a minute change in the asteroid’s velocity, years before a collision, would be enough to make it pass by our planet harmlessly.

There are literally thousands of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids out there in our Solar System. Here are the obits of a few. (Credit: Futurism)

Finally, the results of yet another demonstration test by a spacecraft in LOE have been published and in the long run it could prove to be more important that Ingenuity or DART. Last year, in November 2020 a 20kg CubeSat designated NPT30-I2 was placed into orbit. Built by a small aerospace company named ThrustMe the satellite was designed as a test bed for a new design of Ion Propulsion Engine that uses the element Iodine as it fuel.

The Spacecraft Propulsion System you can hold in your hand. The Iodine fueled NPT30-I2 Ion Engine it a big step forward in developing the spacecraft of the future. (Credit: Air and Cosmos)

All previous ion rocket engines, whether used in interplanetary probes such as NASA’s Dawn mission or Japan’s Hayabusa, or as station keeping thrusters for satellites in Earth orbit have employed Xenon gas as their fuel because Xenon is both easy to ionize and since Xenon has a heavy nucleus you get a good push from the gas. But Xenon gas is hard to contain, requiring heavy pressure vessels to store so scientists have been searching for a better fuel. Iodine has many of the same characteristics as Xenon, but it can be stored as a solid, greatly reducing the necessary weight and Iodine is significantly less expensive than Xenon as well.

The amount of thrust you can get from an ion engine is very small but it can continue to fire for literally years making them much more powerful than any type of chemical rocket. (Credit: ThrustMe)

The data published in the journal Nature clearly shows that NPT30-I2 performed well, carrying out its ordered maneuvers with greater efficiency than a comparable Xenon ion thruster. Iodine has its problems as well however; it can be very corrosive so a ceramic container is required to keep it from damaging other equipment. Also, since the Iodine must be converted into a gas before it can be ionized the thruster is not as responsive as one using Xenon as a fuel.

   With each new demonstration that shows promise, and with each success of new technology our ability to live and work in space grows.

Space news for September 2021: First Tourist flight into Orbit is a Complete Success.

In manned spaceflight uneventful and even boring are synonyms for successful and that’s exactly the way the ‘Inspiration Four’ mission of the Space X Dragon capsule went this past weekend. Billed as the first all-civilian space mission the tourist flight was paid for by billionaire Jared Isaacman, who with considerable experience as a pilot including time in high performance jets served as commander. Iassacman intended the mission to be a fundraising event for St. Jude’s children’s hospital and it did in fact succeed in raising $100 million dollars for the charity, which Iassacman then matched with $100 million of his own.

The Inspiration 4 crew in their Dragon capsule ready for launch. Left to right are Chris Sembroski, Sian Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Haley Arceneux. (Credit: Business Insider)

The four person crew of Inspiration Four also included Sian Procotor a Doctor of Geology who had unsuccessfully tried out for the astronaut corp and a Lockheed Martin engineer named Chris Sembroski. The final crewmember was Haley Arceneux who is a physician’s assistant at St. Jude’s and is herself a childhood cancer survivor.

Launch of the Inspiration 4 mission. (Credit: Times of India)

The launch took place at two minutes after eight P.M. EDT on the 15th of September and the assent into orbit went perfectly. Space X even succeeded in recovering the rocket’s first stage, a once impossible achievement that has now become routine for them. Once in orbit the passengers had three days of floating in zero-gee and enjoying the sights of the Earth below, the Dragon capsule having been modified with a transparent cupola to allow the crew a panoramic view of our planet.

Since the Inspiration 4 mission wasn’t going to the International Space Station it’s docking hatch was modified to give the crew an awesome view of the Earth. (Credit: The New York Times.)

Splashdown came at about seven P.M. on the 18th and within an hour all four passengers were out of the capsule and waving from the deck of Space X’s recovery ship. The entire mission had gone without incident or problem of any kind, in other words it was a complete success.

Splashdown of the Inspiration 4 mission. Space X is getting so good at the mechanics of spaceflight that all this is becoming routine, which will allow NASA to go on to do bolder explorations. (Credit: The New York Times)

The whole trip was entirely arranged and conducted by Space X Corporation itself, the crew training; flight path and even the food selections were all made without any assistance or even input from NASA. If the Inspiration Four mission represents any kind of progress it is simply that, space travel is now no longer the monopoly of governments, instead it now resembles something like air travel in the 1920s as the first airline companies were being formed.

Pan Am’s Fleet of Clippers introduced the world to the concept of international air travel. Space X hopes to do much the same in space. (Credit: Midway Island)

And the four passengers aboard the Space X Dragon also helped set another record, the most people in space at the same time. You see there are currently seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Three are from NASA, two from the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos and one each from the Japanese Space Agency and the European Space Agency.

And for the first day of the Inspiration Four mission there were also three Chinese Taikonauts aboard their under construction space station the Tiangong. In fact the three Chinese space travelers were packing up and getting ready to end their three month long mission as the Space X rocket was launched. The trio of taikonauts landed their Shenzhou 12 capsule in the Gobi Desert on the morning of the 17th of September. While the members of the Shenzhou 12 may have been the first occupants of the Tiangong space station they will not be the last, China plans at least three more manned missions to Tiangong in the next few years.

The first crew of China’s Tiangong space station spent 3 months in orbit making it China’s longest space mission to date. (Credit: Space.com)

So at least for one day there were a total of 14 human beings in orbit at the same time in three different spacecraft. Hopefully this is an omen of the future as newer, perhaps larger space stations are built and more commercial launch vehicles become available. And hopefully within the next decade human beings will return to the Moon as well, this time to stay.

The Three crew members of the Shenzhou 12 mission to the Tiangong space station landed safely in the Gobi desert while the Inspiration 4 crew were in orbit. (Credit: Space News)

So for the next few decades space travel will continue to be reserved for those with deep pockets, whether government of private, just as air travel was 100 years ago. But things are finally starting to speed up, before too many years go by space launches will become routine, just like an airplane taking off from an airport.

NASA is already preparing for that day. Currently the space agency is considering about twelve proposals for space stations submitted under its new program Commercial Low-Earth-Orbit Destinations. The idea is similar to NASA’s Commercial Crew Program that developed Space X’s Dragon capsule.

Mock up of Bigelow Aerospace’s planned space station. (Credit: The New York Times)

The plan is for NASA to help fund, not totally fund the development of private space stations and then rent space on them as needed. The corporation that owns the station can then rent the rest of the station to other countries, or corporations or individuals, exactly as Space X did with Inspiration Four.

Axion Aerospace plans to build an addition to the current ISS and then, when the ISS is retired, use it as the foundation for their own station. (Credit: Space.com)

By year’s end NASA hopes to select two to four of the proposals and distribute funding totaling $400 million. Indeed NASA has already funded Axiom Aerospace Corporation to the tune of $140 million for modules that will be attached to the ISS beginning in 2024 and which Axiom hopes to use as a basis for its own space station once the ISS is retired.

Before I go I would like to mention one of NASA’s recent robotic missions that has also turned out to be a real success, the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. The original plans for the little helicopter, the first man-made aircraft to fly on another world, was to have it carry out three experimental test flights simply to see if flight of any kind was possible on Mars, where the atmosphere is only about 1.5% as dense as Earth’s.

Having already carried out four times as many flights as were originally planned the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars is another example of NASA not only doing the impossible but doing it better than even they thought they could! (Credit: SpaceNews)

Ingenuity passed those initial tests with ease and so the helicopter’s mission was expanded to allow the little flyer to act as a scout for it’s parent the Perseverance rover. Ingenuity has since made another 10 flights, checking out the terrain ahead of the rover while looking for anything interesting that the scientists back on Earth might want Perseverance to look over.

Like something out of a Hollywood movie the little Ingenuity helicopter (l) is stealing attention from the main attraction the Perseverance rover (r). (Credit: NASA’s Mars Exploration Program)

However conditions on Mars can change with the seasons and that includes the density of the atmosphere. Over the last few weeks the density in Jezero crater has dropped making it harder for Ingenuity’s rotors to develop enough thrust to get the helicopter off the ground.

In response the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory have had to speed up the rotational speed of Ingenuity’s rotors. So far this workaround has been successful but if the air density gets much lower increasing the speed even further might not work, or it might damage the helicopter’s motors.

Before long we may all feel that way! (Credit: The Week)

So how much longer Ingenuity will be capable of flying is questionable, still it has more than proven that not only can aircraft operate on Mars, but that there’s a lot to be gained by them doing so. The real proof of that may be that the Chinese space agency is already considering adding a helicopter to their next Mars lander!

Space News for April 2021.

Like the Wright brothers’ first flight, which only went 36 meters, the April 19th flight of the Ingenuity helicopter may not have gone far, but it was the first powered flight by a human built aircraft on another planet. There’s also a lot of other news concerning both manned and robotic spaceflight but I’ll begin with Ingenuity.

The Ingenuity helicopter resting on the Martian surface prior to its first flight. Notice the tracks of the Perseverance rover in front of the ‘copter. This image was taken by Perseverance. (Credit: CNN)

NASA’s newest rover to Mars Perseverance carried the tiny, 1.8 kg, Ingenuity helicopter with it to the red planet as it made its landing back on the 18th of February. Then a little more than a month later on March 28th the rover gently placed the small helicopter on the Martian surface in preparation for its first flight. After taking several days to check out Ingenuity’s system it was decided to carry out one last full spin test of the helicopter’s rotors on April 9th leading to a scheduled first flight on April 11th.

Perseverance deploying the Ingenuity helicopter. (Credit: CNET)

As with any new technology there are always teething problems and during the April 9th test the Ingenuity rotors failed to reach their full spin speed of 2500 RPM. Taking about a week to investigate the problem and transmit a new software package to the helicopter the engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labouratory (JPL) carried out a more successful test on April 17th. With that final test completed the first flight of Ingenuity was scheduled for the early morning hours of April 19th. To watch a YouTube video of that first flight click on the link provided https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfHfQamhimE

The flight plan was deliberately simple; the small helicopter would rise about 3m into the air and hover in place for a few seconds. While hovering Ingenuity would turn 90º, hover for a little while more before descending and landing, as close to it’s takeoff location as possible.

It all went perfectly and the proof of just how successful the test went was provided by a video taken by the Perseverance rover parked just 20m away. With this first, historic flight completed the engineers at JPL went on to conduct two other flights with the longest lasting 80 seconds aloft while traveling 100 meters at a maximum speed of 7.2kph. With three flights completed, two additional flights for the little helicopter remain to be carried out in earl May.

A few facts about Ingenuity and its first flight. (Credit: Phys.org)

Ingenuity after all is a technology demonstrator; it was designed to see if flying on Mars, where the atmosphere is only 1% as dense as here on Earth, was even possible. The helicopter’s creators want to learn everything they can about the problems and possibilities of flight there. Nevertheless during those test flights it is hoped that Ingenuity may prove useful to Perseverance as a reconnaissance aircraft looking for interesting rock formations that Perseverance can then examine close up.

And Perseverance may have a new neighbor on the Martian surface before long as the Chinese space agency has announced plans to send the descent module of their Tianwen 1 space probe for a landing sometime in mid-May. The Tianwen 1 probe, which entered orbit around the red planet in February, consists of a combined orbiter and lander modules and the scientists leading the mission have spend the last two months both checking out the spacecraft and determining exactly where they wanted to target their lander. If successful the Tianwen 1 lander would make China only the second nation to successfully place a robotic probe on the Martian surface.

China’s Tianwen-1 space probe is currently orbiting Mars and preparing to detach and land a small rover. (Credit: Yahoo news UK)

Further out in the Solar System NASA’s Osiris-REx space probe will leave orbit around the asteroid Bennu on May 10th and begin its long journey back to Earth. Osiris-REx has been studying the asteroid for 3 years and back on October 20, 2020 and even made contact with Bennu in a Touch and Go sample collecting maneuver. Currently Osiris-REx is conducting one last flyover of Bennu paying particular attention to the area where it carried out the Touch and Go.

Images taken during Osiris-REx’s Touch and Go landing on the asteroid Bennu. (Credit:NewsBeezer)

You see during that maneuver the spacecraft’s sample gathering arm sank a full 48.8 cm into the asteroid’s surface and when Osiris-REx fired its thrusters to pull away a considerable amount to dust and debris erupted in the asteroid’s low gravity. While no harm was done to Osiris-REx the scientists at JPL were curious as to whether the Touch and Go had altered the surface of Bennu.

Before and after images of the surface of Bennu. Osiris-REx made a nice little divot on the surface. (Credit: NASA)

Turned out the encounter had left a nice scar where Osiris-REx landed, a mark that could last for thousands of years in the airless microgravity of Bennu. Just another example of how the human race is now making a mark not only on our own planet but also throughout the Solar System.

There are a few other brief items that I’ll cover quickly. The final two passengers have been selected for the first fully commercial space flight. As I mentioned in my post of the 17th of March of this year billionaire Jared Isaacman has hired Space X to send him and three ‘guests’ into orbit for a 3-5 day long ‘vacation’. Isaacman wants to use the flight to help publicize his favourite charity, Saint Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and so for his first companion he choose physician’s assistant Hayley Arceneaux who was herself a cancer patient at St. Jude’s when she was a child.

The two remaining seats on what has been christened the ‘Inspiration 4’ mission will now go to Doctor Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski. Doctor Proctor is a Geoscientist and space communication expert who was awarded her chance to travel into space by winning a contest sponsored by Isaacman’s e-commerce company Shift 4 payments.

The crew of Inspiration 4 mission. Left to right, Jared Isaacman, Hayley Arceneaux, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski. (Credit: Daily Express)

Mister Sembroski was chosen from some 72,000 entries to a fundraising contest benefiting St. Jude’s and will serve as a mission specialist for the flight. Currently the mission, which will launch from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, is scheduled to take off no earlier than September 15 of 2021.

Even while Space X is moving forward with its commercialization of human spaceflight Boeing’s Starliner Space Capsule can’t seem to get off the launch pad, quite literally. The final unmanned test flight of Starliner, officially Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2), had been scheduled for this month but because of technical problems with the capsule’s avionics that launch date will have to be delayed at least a month.

The Boeing Starliner capsule being readied for its second OFT-2 flight. Continuing problems have now delayed that flight until at least August! (Credit: CNET)

Problem is that the launch facilities at Kennedy are booked right through mid-summer. The earliest date possible for Starliner’s unmanned flight is August, which will almost certainly push back the earliest manned test flight, officially Crew Test Flight-1 (CTF-1) currently scheduled for September. Just further delays on a program that seems to be going nowhere.

Oh, and speaking of Space X, the Hawthorn California based company launched it’s third manned mission to the ISS. The mission, officially named Crew-2 by NASA, carried two NASA, one European Space Agency and One Japanese Space Agency astronaut into Low Earth Orbit (LOE) on the 23rd of April. Mission commander Shane Kimbrough along with pilot Megan McArthur rode their Falcon 9 rocket with mission specialists Thomas Pesquet and Akihiko Hoshide to relieve the current Crew-1 astronauts and begin a 6-month tour aboard the ISS. The Crew-1 astronauts are scheduled to return to Earth aboard their Space X dragon capsule on the first of May.

In this image made from NASA video, the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft lifts off for the Crew-2 mission carrying NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough, Megan McArthur, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide from Launch Complex 39A, Friday, April 23, 2021, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (NASA via AP)
The Space X crew 2 astronauts, in black jerseys, join the other astronauts aboard the ISS. These 11 crew members represents the most people in space at the same time since the end of NASA’s shuttle program. (Credit: SpaceNews)

With their third manned mission for NASA in less than a year and the coming launch of their first purely civilian mission Space X is generating quite a lot of excitement. Is this the start of a new age in space with commercial and national agencies working together to explore our solar system?