You’ll probably be asking yourself what’s he driving at? How is it that, with the disaster in international travel thanks to COVID-19, you’ll be talking about flying, when thousands of Australians are still caught up somewhere else far from their homeland as there are simply not enough flights?
In fact, I’ll be talking about a fascinating story taking place courtesy of human ingenuity, advanced engineering and lots and lot of money. The place is Mars, a planet in our solar system, with a diameter of 6800km (a little above half that of earth), which can be found in an orbit around the sun of 78 million kilometres bigger than earth’s.
Mars is a really interesting planet. Firstly, in the past it was said to contain water canals, a made-up story, but recently astronomers have concluded that in the past, the planet had water, lots of water. This is thought to have disappeared when the atmosphere of Mars practically disappeared, and what is left are only remnants on the face of the planet, and it’s thought some still also exists under the surface.
The presence of water is not only of academic interest, as we know that water is essential to life on our earth, and there is therefore at least the possibility that in the past life developed on Mars as well. This is one of the main reasons why there is so much interest in Mars by the space agencies of major countries, such as the USA and China, which each have a mission intending to release a rover onto this planet.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the US already has two rovers on Mars: Curiosity, which was lowered in 2011 and is still actively making scientific work, and Perseverance, which has just been lowered in the middle of February of this year 2021. China is also expected to land its rover, part of its Tianwen-1 mission, in May 2021.
Firstly, this helicopter need to resist the freezing temperatures on Mars, where this regularly plunges to 100 degrees below zero. A similar temperature (-93C) was the coldest ever recorded on Antarctica in 2010.
Secondly, the atmosphere on Mars is very thin, with a pressure less than 1% that of Earth. This means that the helicopter’s rotors need to rotate about three times as fast as those of helicopters on Earth. This is necessarily in order to push the little gas they encounter (the atmosphere of Mars is made up of carbon dioxide) downwards to lift the helicopter.
It is expected that the helicopter can only fly for about 90 seconds every time, before having to go back to its base, where it would be able to charge its batteries with the energy of the sun.
The NASA team in these days is preparing for the first flight, which if everything goes well there will be five of them over a period of about a month. The intention behind these flights is purely a demonstration that such a thing is possible.
The significance of this project is being compared to the first flight by the Wright brothers, when they had flown the Kitty Hawk for the first time on earth in 1903, with a total flight time of 3.5 seconds.
Therefore, the flight will be automated, and after the button representing ‘fly’ is pressed, mission control will have several nail-biting minutes until they will know whether the helicopter came back down to the surface literally with a bang, or in readiness to fly another day!
We will wait and see!
1https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/#, retrieved 30/3/2021
2https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/communications/, retrieved 30/3/2021
No comments:
Post a Comment