“As part of its next mission to Mars, leaving Earth this summer, the space agency will attempt to do something that has never been done before: fly a helicopter through the rarefied atmosphere of Mars.
If it works, the small helicopter, named Ingenuity, will open a new way for future robotic explorers to get a bird’s-eye view of Mars and other worlds in the solar system.”
“By the end of 2014, the engineers had built a small prototype. The little helicopter was placed in a chamber where most of the air was sucked out, replicating the density of the Martian atmosphere. Because they had yet to write the software for the helicopter to fly itself, a member of the team tried to guide its motion with a joystick, like a hobbyist flying a drone.”
“The first is to go up about a few feet and hover for up to 30 seconds, then land. Subsequent flights will be longer, higher, farther. On the fifth flight, if everything works, Ingenuity will go up about 15 feet, fly out 500 feet and then return back to where it started. It has two cameras: a downward-facing, black-and-white one for keeping track of where it is; and a color one for oblique views of the landscape. The flight will last a minute and a half.”
Source: Chang, K. (2020, June 23). Mars is about to have its “Wright brothers moment.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/science/mars-helicopter-nasa.html?searchResultPosition=10
Analysis: I like that this is kind of a real world application of aviation future. The application of prototyping and trying different things could lead to a staged experience for kids to build something that can fly, and the means to do so could be physical or digital.
