Gravity on mars skin#

The system also needed a sophisticated degree of autonomy. “We needed to keep the fuselage’s battery, computer, and sensors warm enough to function.” “The rotors, solar cells, and landing gear were designed to survive the Martian night without heating,” Aung said.

The heart of the fuselage also contained temperature sensors and a resistance strip for heating.

Gravity on mars skin#

Aung’s team modeled everything, even the insulating air gap between the circuit boards and the fuselage skin, then wrapped the skin with a DuPont Kapton polyimide film spray-coated with four different metals to modulate the amount of heat that entered and escaped. The fuselage consisted of a central battery surrounded by five circuit boards, which formed a cube that opens on top to connect with the drive. The first prototype took 100 hours to hand wind. It included square wires to squeeze out every possible gain in efficiency. Using advanced algorithms developed at JPL, AeroVironment built a 23-pole-pair brushless d.c. JPL worked with NASA Langley Research Center and AeroVironment to build a custom motor that could achieve those speeds. So they opted for a pair of counter-rotating rotors whose torques cancelled out one another. Yet the designers could not afford the mass and volume of a tail rotor to cancel the torque of the main blades. In order to achieve lift in the thin Martian atmosphere, the rotors needed to be large (1.2 meters) and rotate rapidly (40-45 revolutions per second). That led to many unique designs, starting with the rotor. It has to balance mass, volume, power, and energy for the mission.” So you can’t just design the best control system or rotor for you. “Everything you do individually touches everything else, especially when we’re making something so small and so light. “When we began the project, I told everyone that they had to be good at their discipline-but they also had to be a systems engineer,” Aung said. You May Also Like: Apollo 500 Years After Still, it is a lot to fit into one package. She is the helicopter’s project manager at JPL’s Solar System Exploration Directorate. It has taken 20 years to develop small and powerful enough batteries, computers, flight control systems, and solar cells that make this possible, said MiMi Aung. Photo: Jet Propulsion LaboratoryThe concept dates back to the late 1990s, when models showed that a fast-spinning ultralight helicopter could fly on Mars. Also, large size allows low rotation rates, which minimize rotation-induced vertigo.Members of the JPL Mars Helicopter team mount the unit to a test system that will simulate the red planet’s low gravity and thin atmosphere. The large station scenario is attractive because with a few design accommodations, you can experiment with a large range of g levels simultaneously, just by having habitats at different distances from the axis. The only practical way to get long-term data on a range of g levels is to build habitats in space (probably LEO) that provide artificial gravity, whether they are the large Clarke/von Braun-style rotating stations, or just pairs of habitats rotating on a tether, or something else. This argues for some research, based on actual data, before we send people to Mars for years-long stays on the surface. They might not be the same for all the effects. But we have no idea what the threshold g levels for these effects are. Among them: cardiovascular, vision, renal, even brain function. We know of a host of effects from long-term zero g, and not just on bones.

We have usable data on physiological effects for only three gravity levels: zero, Earth g, and 1/6 Earth g, the latter for only three days or less at a time, so those data don't speak to long-term effects.