ウィスパリング同時通訳研究会コミュのNASA gives update on Mars helicopter Ingenuity Fitst 20 min

5:19
Raquel Villanueva: (05:19)
Welcome to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter hitched a ride to the red planet on the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover, which landed in Jezero Crater on February 18th. Now, Ingenuity is getting ready to attempt the first powered controlled flight on another planet. Today, we will update you on the helicopter’s operations and what to expect from its first flight, currently scheduled for Sunday, April 11th. I’m your host, Raquel Villanueva. To tell us about Ingenuity’s upcoming flight is Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science. MiMi Aung, project manager, Tim Canham, Ingenuity operations lead, Amy Kwan ingenuity chamber test engineer, Elsa Jensen, mass cam Z uplink operations lead for mail and space side systems. For anyone watching who’d like to submit a question, you can do so by using the Mars helicopter hashtag. Our phone lines are now open to the media. You can ask a question by pressing star one and enter the queue. To start, I’d like to welcome Thomas Zurbuchen, who will tell us about the importance of technology demonstrations like Ingenuity. Thanks for getting us started, Thomas.

Thomas Zurbuchen: (06:51)
Thanks so much, Raquel. I want to take you back at 10:30. In the morning on a cool December morning in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, history was made. It took 12 seconds to make history. The first controlled flight here on Earth and something that had huge consequences, and I was thinking about that yesterday as I sat on an airplane from DC to Los Angeles, benefiting from that technology demonstration. We’re already on the surface of Mars. I want to bring up that selfie image that we’ve seen on social media, an image that shows that we’re ready for another historic moment, a historic moment, the likes of which, I believe, have analogs in 1903, controlled flight on a different planet. So when I look at this picture, of course, I think of the amazing team that got us there, the amazing people here at JPL, you’re going to hear from them, but also the industrial partners that supported us, including Lockheed Martin, for example, to help with the release device.(08:15)
I think all of the colleagues in the aeronautics directorate at NASA, and then the Space Tech and the Human Exploration director colleagues that brought instruments onto the Perseverance Rover. I think of the team that came to getter with two words that will always be attached to both of these vehicles. The first one, of course, perseverance. And the second one, ingenuity. Those two words, I think are, especially as we do this still under COVID times, words that will always be attached to the history of this amazing feat that we’re about to attempt. I want to talk about technology demonstration. And if you have paid attention, you may have noticed that we’ve really added quite a number of technology demonstrations specifically to our portfolio of missions, not just in the science mission directorate, but across the entire agency.(09:17)
Consider, for example, the Psyche Spacecraft. And I just want to tell you, I’m so excited to actually go visit that spacecraft this afternoon, next door to here, together with the principal investigator who has never seen it. And of course, the reason I’m talking about Psyche is that this amazing mission to this asteroid Psyche, this potential [inaudible 00:09:41] world out there, I want to talk about the deep space optical communication system that Space Tech is funding that’s on top of it, allowing us to test the ability of getting high bandwidth communication all the way from Mars distances to the Earth. I want to talk about next the coronagraph on board the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is a technology demonstration also developed here to prove that technology, to allow us to image or detect worlds, exoplanets at brightnesses that are 20 million times weaker than the star in the middle, allowing us potentially to open up new ways of investigating these worlds as we’re searching for other planets, like our Earth, or planets, the likes of which we have no analogs of right here in the solar system (10:40)
Other directorates have also done technology demonstration. And I want to talk about two of them that will go with the on crew Artemis mission. The first one is the lunar flashlight, a cube set that will look for water, especially frozen water, at the moon and help guide human exploration and robotic exploration on this world next to us. The near Earth Astrid scout, which is another cube set that will go with this entire Artemis mission, will look for asteroids that we could explore robotically and perhaps with humans in the future with novel propulsion technologies that it’s going to demonstrate. (11:26)
And the final technology demonstration I want to talk to you about today looks like this little plane, but it’s the Maxwell Aircraft, demonstrating electric flight in novel ways of integrating that propulsion technology and approving it and really moving us towards net zero emission flight, a transformative change to all of technologies that, of course, we are enabling us to travel across the country and around the world. So these are some technology demonstration of many that are there that give us this high risk, high reward opportunity to really change the trajectory of what’s possible, just like we want to see Ingenuity do and the next couple of days. And I’m so excited now to turn it over to MiMi Aung, who, of course, has been the inspiring leader of Ingenuity. And I just really look forward to hearing from you now, MiMi.

MiMi Aung: (12:35)
Thank you. Thank you, Thomas. Well, the moment that our team has been waiting for is almost here. Sunday, the first flight. Each world gets only one first flight. So as Thomas mentioned, the Wright brothers achieved the first flight on earth. Ingenuity is poised to go for being the first for Mars. It’s going to be a flight experiment. Flight experiments are as oldest flying. So the Wright brothers’ first successful controlled flight powered controlled flight was a flight experiment. Next picture, please. Everybody is familiar with this picture, and that was Wilbur Wright performing this flight successfully on December 17th, 1903.(13:26)
Few people know that that wasn’t his first attempt. So in the next picture showing not successful flight, that was taken in on December 14th, three days before in 1903, and the Wright brothers did not succeed. Well, history tells us that Orville and Wilbur took this setback as, like true engineers, went back, looked at the data, review the data, confirmed that their fundamental understanding of flying was correct, make the tweaks, went for it again, and succeeded. I love this picture because it’s truly a flight experiment. And in fact, that night after the failure, Wilbur wrote that there is now no question of final success.(14:16)
So they knew, he knew that they had nailed the fundamental understanding and we have to test to advance. And that is what building first of a kind systems and flight experiments are all about. Design, test, learn from the design, adjust the design, test, repeat until success. And so same with Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. We started with the fundamental question, really serious question of, is it really possible whether it’s possible to fly a helicopter on Mars? And it’s challenging for many different reasons, most important of all, the atmosphere at Mars is extremely thin. It’s 1% compared to the atmosphere we have on Earth. And it is very cold at night. The vehicle we send there has to survive cold nights on its own. It has to charge itself. And the winds are new to us. On top of all, this flight experiment that we are performing at Mars has to be operated from back here on Earth.(15:22)
All right, so we took on, we started with the analysis that showed how much we can lift, and then we took systematic, incremental, design, test, and feed into the next level of designing and test. And from showing the capability of lift with a prototype vehicle in simulated Mars atmospheric environment in the 25 foot chamber here at JPL, we showed lift. From then on, we went to show that we can build… We demonstrated first full control flight, power flight in our chamber in 2016. We went on to then develop the full-up model that is needed for the system to need to fly a test at Mars. And as we call it the engineering development model, we demonstrated full success test flight. We flew it successfully in our chamber in 2018, and then we built Ingenuity, which we flew in our chamber in 2019.(16:24)
So this is the result. The picture you see is a closer photo of Ingenuity Mars Helicopter taken very shortly before we packed it to be shipped to Florida, to be integrated onto Perseverance Rover. Thomas, actually, you were in the lab visiting us the day this photo was taken. So this is one of my four favorite pictures on this project. So this little four pound vehicle, the vehicle that you’re seeing is four pounds, to date, as we speak, has been surviving on its own. The cold nights, the temperatures there get down to minus 90 degrees centigrade, so minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s been surviving on its own. It has been successfully charging. It’s recharging his battery during the day. It has been communicating to a space station that resides on the rubber, ultimately exchanging information with us. And we have fully confirmed that it has enough energy and power to perform this flight at Mars.(17:28)
And the flight in Mars is high power. Peak powers exceed 350 Watts. So the vehicle is set. And the last time Ingenuity flew was here at JPL in the 25 foot chamber with us, with our team. And at that time, we said, “Next time Ingenuity flies, it will be at Mars.” [inaudible 00:17:48]. Next is a picture of our team. Oh, there it is at Mars. You see it? On its own, little four pounder. And next, please, is a picture of the helicopter team. Now, not everybody could make to this photo session. It’s a large team, and across the country. Here, our team at JPL, NASA Ames, NASA Langley, our industrial partners, AeroVironment, Qualcomm, SolAero, Lockheed others. And we are really proud to have achieved to where we are at this moment. And we’re looking forward to our first live attempt on Sunday. (18:31)
So on behalf of our whole team, Thomas, I’d like to thank NASA and every organization for letting dare mighty things, and in this case, daring to fly on another planet. Really, thank you. And recapping the goals of the Mars helicopter technology demonstration is to meet NASA’s agency level objectives, and there are three. The first is to demonstrate on Earth that it is possible to fly a controlled power flight on Mars, and we have done that. And the second objective we have is to actually fly at Mars. We’re within a few days of doing that. And third is to return data, to inform engineers, developing the future generations of helicopters for Mars. We have started receiving data, and so far so good, and we’re looking forward to the data coming up.(19:29)
So now turning our attention to the first flight attempt on Sunday. So up to now, we have been talking to Ingenuity every day since Ingenuity was dropped perfectly by Perseverance Rover to the surface. And we have checked out Ingenuity’s energy profile, very healthy, very good. We’re happy. The thermal models have been checked out. The sensors have been turned on. Computers are on, operating well. Rotor, the blades had been released, and we have finished testing the rotor operating low speed spin at 50 RPM. So we have one final checkout test and that’s scheduled for today, and that’s to spin the rotors full speed to the flight RPM. And after that, we will be set to go. So so far, so good. Knock on wood. (20:23)
So we have chosen the time of the first flight to be 12:30 PM Mars local time. And this time is picked between assessment of wind conditions and assessment of having sufficient energy and power for Ingenuity to perform a robust flight. So in parallel, we have been communicating with the MEDA team on the weather at Mars. MEDA is the weather instrument on the Perseverance Rover. Initial metadata indicates that we could encounter winds higher than what we were able to test on Earth, but there’s also a probability it could be less than what we tested on earth. There is uncertainty in the predicted range, but our simulations show that we are able to… The system, the closed loop controlled flight system, is resilient to this range of wins. But that’s an example of exactly why we are testing at Mars, performing this light experiment. So we have carefully designed. We have carefully tested on Earth. We have been checking out carefully on Mars up to now, and it’s time to attend the first flight. And we will test, prove, and learn, regardless of what the outcome is in this first attempt.(21:41)
So for Sunday, there are four possible outcomes. The first is full success. Second, partial success. Third could be insufficient or no data coming back, which means we’ll have to take more time to figure out what’s happened. Or it could be failure. So please join us. And regardless, we will learn whether it’s success, failure, interim. But one thing is for sure, we have done everything we can, and if we don’t make that first attempt, for sure, we will not make progress forward. So with that, to describe more of what’s coming up, I’d like to hand it over to Tim Canham.