Posted on 04/12/2020 8:56:21 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Perseverance's descent stage was also fueled up last weekend, just before the helicopter integration, NASA officials said.
The descent stage is the rocket-powered sky crane that will lower Perseverance onto the Martian dirt via cables in February 2021. Gassing up the crane was no trivial task; the craft's four tanks hold a total of 884 lbs. (401 kilograms) of hydrazine propellant, agency officials said.
"The last hundred days before any Mars launch is chock-full of significant milestones," David Gruel, the Mars 2020 assembly, test and launch operations manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. (JPL built Perseverance and is the lead center for the rover's mission, which is called Mars 2020.)
"Fueling the descent stage is a big step," Gruel added. "While we will continue to test and evaluate its performance as we move forward with launch preparations, it is now ready to fulfill its mission of placing Perseverance on the surface on Mars."
That placement will occur inside Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) hole in the ground that hosted a lake and a river delta in the Red Planet's ancient past. Perseverance will hunt for signs of long-dead Martian life, characterize the region's geology and perform a number of other tasks, chief among
If all goes according to plan, the helicopter will be deployed in May 2021, 2.5 months after Perseverance's touchdown. The little solar-powered chopper will then conduct a series of short flights during a test campaign that will last up to 30 days.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
"Is that a Titleist?"
The atmospheric pressure at the top of Everest is about 4.89 pounds per square inch (psi). On Mars’ surface it’s 0.088 psi. Good luck with the helicopter’s performance for any length of time.
The wikipedia article says that flight duration is max three minutes for the Mars ‘copter. I knew the atmosphere on Mars thin, but I didn’t know how thin! If Mars gravity is roughly .4 of earth, then the vehicle weighs about 1.6 pounds. I hope there is enough atmosphere for those blades to catch and carry!
Maybe they can tell her she can fly it back. But she needs to stop at the moon for pictures.
rwood
Thinner atmosphere. You need more blade surface to achieve the same results as on Earth.
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