Sky & Telescope - August 2022 - 14

Liftoff
uDO THE HUSTLE Left: Flight test leader Teddy Tzanetos, MiMi Aung, and Bob Balaram (from left to right) observe a flight test inside JPL's Space
Simulator in January 2019. Center: Team members attach a thermal film to the helicopter's fuselage in February 2019. Right: Engineers attach the
helicopter to the rover's belly in August 2019.
for some time. Given that, and realizing that both the pace
and the amount of science could be substantially enhanced
with the help of a flying scout, Matt led a 2014 proposal to
include a " Mars Helicopter Scout " on NASA's upcoming Mars
2020 rover mission. That JPL team included, among others,
Bob as chief engineer and planetary missions camera expert
Justin Maki as the imaging lead.
NASA didn't select the proposal to be part of the mission's
scientific payload, opting instead for cameras, spectrometers,
and environmental sensors to fly on what would eventually
be named the Perseverance rover. But the fact that an
advance scout could potentially enable significantly more and
better science - by providing geologic context, identifying key
outcrops for future analysis, and collecting 3D images to help
improve driving - was not lost on the NASA officials putting
the mission together. Nor was it lost on then-JPL Director
Charles Elachi, who persistently and energetically continued
to advocate to NASA Headquarters that they find a way to add
such scouting capability to the mission. Elachi also helped
direct some internal JPL research and development funding
toward the idea, to continue work on the design.
Elachi's persistence and internal investments paid off in
2018, when NASA decided to include JPL's helicopter scout
as a separately funded " technology demonstration " mission.
Carried to Mars on Perseverance's belly, the helicopter
was tasked with proving that controlled, powered flight by
FIRST FLIGHT On April 19,
2021, Ingenuity lifted itself
into the thin Martian air. These
snapshots are from the movie
Perseverance's Mastcam-Z
took as the helicopter spun
up its rotor blades, rose to 3
meters, rotated, hovered, and
then touched back down.
a remote-controlled robotic vehicle was possible on a planet
hundreds of millions of kilometers away.
So began the adventure of doing what no one had done
before: flying on Mars.
Make Haste
Time was short: The heli had to be mounted to the underside
of the rover by the summer of 2019, in preparation for the
rover to be fully tested that fall and then shipped to Cape
Canaveral in early 2020 for its launch that summer. That left
less than 18 months to build a working flyer - the blink of an
eye compared with a typical NASA project schedule.
The small design and test team had to be nimble, working
quickly and efficiently within a large and relatively riskintolerant
government organization that is not particularly
well-known for being quick or efficient. The team shared
similarities with JPL's earlier Sojourner rover team, Justin
tells me, which labored back in the 1990s when he started
his career at JPL to design the first wheeled vehicle that would
drive on Mars. Both projects were technology demonstrations
that had a " Skunk Works kind of team, " he says, referring to
a division at the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin: a small
group operating semi-independently within a much larger
infrastructure, trying to solve unprecedented and high-risk
engineering problems.
Then-JPL systems engineer MiMi Aung also joined as proj14
AUGUST 2022 * SKY & TELESCOPE
LAB PHOTOS: NASA / JPL-CALTECH (3); TIME SERIES OF
FIRST FLIGHT: NASA / JPL-CALTECH / ASU / MSSS

Sky & Telescope - August 2022

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