By Ilana Williams
Humans spent decades sending robots into space, but they never took flight on Mars. It turns out all they might have needed was Ingenuity.
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first aircraft to fly on Mars on April 19. Members of the University of Maryland’s aerospace engineering department said they are excited for the next stage of space exploration.
Ravi Lumba, a UMD graduate research assistant in the Department of Aerospace Engineering working on the next generation of the Mars helicopter, said the next craft will be larger, will include better camera sensors and may be able to bring back samples.
“When you start studying helicopters, you realize how difficult it is to get stuff to fly on Mars,” Lumba said. “It makes it more impressive when it does fly.”
Lumba and Dr. Anubhav Datta, an aerospace engineering professor, are working on different designs before sending the best configuration to NASA. The flight models for Ingenuity predicted a similar behavior to how this first helicopter actually flew.
“That’s a very good thing,” Lumba said. “That means when we’re designing the next one, we know our predictions are going to be pretty accurate.”
Ingenuity made three flights on Mars and is preparing for a fourth one.
“Space technologies have really [advanced] extremely rapidly,” said Adithya Arun, a sophomore aerospace engineering student. “We’re really in a new space age right now.”
NASA has made a lot of progress with their projects, according to Arun. The James Webb Space Telescope, which is the successor to the Hubble Telescope, will use longer wavelengths to spot the first galaxies and look inside dust clouds where stars and planets form. NASA plans to launch the telescope this Halloween.
NASA is still very focused on the Moon, but Arun hopes for further exploration.
“Creating a long-term establishment on the moon is just a pathway to going to other planets,” Arun said. “It will enable humanity to really become interplanetary.”
Aerospace engineering focuses on how certain things behave in the air, according to Anish Sankla, a sophomore aerospace engineering student. There is a lot to consider before flying an aircraft on Mars, Sankla said.
“Not only is there less gravity, but there’s also thinner air,” Sankla said. “It’s definitely really crazy to see how NASA did all this testing on Earth and [tried it] on a completely different planet.”
Several different commercial space companies, such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, are working on space exploration as well. SpaceX has a vision to create a base on Mars, according to Sankla, who interned there during the semester. SpaceX is owned by Tesla’s Elon Musk, and Blue Origin is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
“We’re currently in a modern space age because there are so many new startup companies,” Sankla said. “It just shows how [many] people are excited about exploring space and willing to do the work.”
NASA and commercial space companies are always thinking of new ways to observe the solar system. Ingenuity has the potential to travel farther and more quickly to navigate to a different planet.
“It’s really awesome to see the technological advancements that we’re making in real time,” Sankla said. “There’s nothing stopping us other than our own imagination.”
Featured image: Ingenuity took a selfie with the Mars Perseverance Rover. Source: NASA.