Ingenuity helicopter sends first status report from Mars!

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  Ingenuity helicopter sends first status report from Mars!

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• Report: Mission controllers at NASA have received the first status report from the Ingenuity Helicopter, which was strapped to the underbelly of the Perseverance rover that touched down on Mars in Feb 2021. Both the helicopter and its base station are operating “as expected”. If things go as planned, Ingenuity, a 1.8-kilogram rotorcraft, will become the first helicopter to fly on another planet. 
• Scientists were looking at two items in the data: The state of charge of Ingenuity’s batteries as well as confirmation the base station is operating as designed, commanding heaters to turn off and on to keep the helicopter’s electronics within an expected range. With a positive report, scientists will move forward with charge of the helicopter’s batteries. The helicopter will remain attached to the rover for 30 to 60 days from the time of touch down. 
• Technology Demonstration: Unlike the Perseverance rover, the Ingenuity Mars helicopter is not carrying any science equipment onboard. Instead, its primary objective is to check whether flight is possible in Mars’ extremely thin atmosphere. The helicopter was able to send a status update to NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter,  which relays messages between Mars and Earth and has been orbiting the red planet since 2006.
• Charge: Presently the helicopter is receiving recharges from the rover’s power supply. But once it is deployed on the surface of the Red Planet, its batteries will be charged solely by its own solar panel. If Ingenuity succeeds in hovering during its first flight, over 90% of the project’s goals will have been achieved. If the rotorcraft lands successfully and remains operable, up to four more flights could be attempted, each one building on the success of the last.
• A long journey: NASA’s Perseverance rover make a historic landing on Mars after seven months in space. The robotic vehicle covered over 472 million km before entering the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 km per hour) to begin its approach to touchdown on the planet’s surface. NASA released a number of stunning images of the surface of the Red Planet taken by the Perseverance rover. After it touched down near an ancient river delta, the rover will now search for traces of ancient life and will gather the most vital rock samples for a possible return to Earth.
• Knowledge centre:

1. Life in universe - The Universe is extremely huge. Can it be possible that humanity is the only form of intelligent life that exists in all this immensity? The possibility that there is life in the Universe has always excited the general public and scientists are equally enthusiastic. Extraterrestrial life is hypothetical life which may occur outside Earth and which did not originate on Earth. Such life might range from simple prokaryotes (or comparable life forms) to intelligent beings and even sapient beings, possibly bringing forth advanced civilizations. The Drake equation speculates about the existence of sapient life elsewhere in the universe. The science of extraterrestrial life in all its forms is known as astrobiology.
2. Helicopters - These are rotorcrafts where lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally-spinning rotors. The helicopter takes off and lands vertically, and can hover, fly forward, backward and laterally. These allow helicopters to be used in congested or isolated areas where fixed-wing aircraft and many forms of VTOL (Vertical TakeOff and Landing) aircraft cannot perform. The configuration of a single main rotor (monocopter) accompanied by a vertical anti-torque tail rotor has become the most common helicopter configuration. Twin-main rotor helicopters (bicopters), in either tandem or transverse rotors configurations, are used for greater payload capacity than the monorotor design. 

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