Researchers complete first real-world study of Martian helicopter dust dynamics

Mars is a dusty planet. From tiny dust devils to huge storms that shroud the planet, dust is a continuing problem for analysis missions. That was very true for Ingenuity, the rotorcraft that since February 2021 has been exploring Mars alongside NASA’s Perseverance rover. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Expertise, the House Science Institute, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have accomplished the primary real-world examine of Martian dust dynamics primarily based on Ingenuity’s historic first flights on the Purple Planet, paving the way in which for future extraterrestrial rotorcraft missions.

The work, reported within the Journal of Geophysical Analysis: Planets, might help NASA’s Mars Pattern Return Program, which is able to retrieve samples collected by Perseverance, or the Dragonfly mission that may set course for Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, in 2027.

“There is a cause that helicopter pilots on Earth favor to land on helipads,” mentioned Jason Rabinovitch, a co-author and assistant professor at Stevens. “When a helicopter lands within the desert, its downdraft can fire up sufficient dust to trigger a zero-visibility ‘brownout’—and Mars is successfully one large desert.”

Rabinovitch has been engaged on the Ingenuity program since 2014, becoming a member of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory quickly after the idea was first pitched to NASA and creating the primary theoretical fashions of helicopter dust lifting within the dusty Martian environments. At Stevens, Rabinovitch continues to work with JPL and investigates plume-surface interactions throughout powered descent of a spacecraft. He additionally fashions supersonic parachute inflation and geophysical phenomena, equivalent to plumes on Enceladus.

Learning dust dynamics on one other planet is not straightforward, defined Rabinovitch. “House is a data-poor surroundings. It is onerous to ship movies and pictures again to Earth, so we’ve got to work with what we will get.”

To beat that problem, Rabinovitch and colleagues at JPL used superior image-processing methods to extract info from six helicopter flights, all low-resolution movies captured by Perseverance. By figuring out tiny variations between video frames, and the sunshine depth of particular person pixels, the researchers have been in a position to calculate each the scale and the total mass of dust clouds kicked up as Ingenuity took off, hovered, maneuvered, and landed.

The outcomes have been inside placing distance of Rabinovitch’s engineering fashions—itself a exceptional achievement, given the limited information accessible to the workforce manner again in 2014, when Rabinovitch and his colleagues have been writing back-of-the-envelope calculations supposed to help the unique design of Ingenuity.

The analysis exhibits that, as predicted, dust is a major consideration for extra-terrestrial rotorcraft, with Ingenuity estimated to have kicked up a few thousandth of its personal mass (4 kilos) in dust every time it flew. That is many instances extra dust than could be generated by an equal helicopter on Earth, although Rabinovitch cautions that it is difficult to attract direct comparisons.

“It was thrilling to see the Mastcam-Z video from Perseverance, which was taken for engineering causes, ended up exhibiting Ingenuity lifting a lot dust from the floor that it opened a brand new line of analysis,” mentioned Mark Lemmon, senior analysis scientist on the House Science Institute Mars Science Laboratory and first writer of the examine.

“When you consider dust on Mars, you must think about not simply the decrease gravity, but in addition the results of air stress, temperature, air density—there’s quite a bit we do not but totally perceive,” Rabinovich mentioned. Nonetheless, he added, that is what makes finding out Ingenuity’s dust clouds so thrilling.

A greater understanding of brownouts might assist NASA lengthen future robotic missions by retaining solar panels operational for longer or make it simpler to land delicate tools safely on the dusty Martian floor. It might additionally supply new insights into the function of wind and wind-carried dust in weather patterns and erosion, each on Earth and in excessive environments across the Photo voltaic System.