NASA’s Mars Helicopter captures spacecraft wreckage on Mars

Whether in real life or fiction, space travel is difficult. When Harry Vanderspeigle (whose real name is unpronounceable) visits our pale blue dot, a stray bolt of lightning knocks down his craft, stranding him on Earth.Even intelligent aliens foreign residents (Now streaming on Peacock) There’s no way to visit another world without leaving a bit of a wreckage.

If there is any alien spacecraft debris on our planet, we haven’t discovered it yet (or it’s hidden), but we have discovered alien spacecraft debris on Mars, and the aliens are us. During the 26th flight of Ingenuity, NASA’s small Mars quadcopter, scientists took photos of the landing equipment shattering and falling into the Martian regolith.

Perseverance and ingenuity left Mars littered with debris

Ingenuity is working on some of the landing equipment responsible for safely transporting it and the Perseverance rover to the surface. It’s all part of the complex Seven Minutes of Terror that begins the rover’s time on the Red Planet.

RELATED: Video of Mars helicopter Ingenuity’s 25th flight

It takes seven minutes to reach the ground from the top of the Martian atmosphere, but it takes at least twice as long for any signal to reach Earth from Mars. Everything that happens during descent and landing must happen automatically, without immediate human intervention.

When Perseverance first made contact with the atmosphere, it was moving at 12,000 to 13,000 miles per hour. The heat shield hits the thin alien air and heats up in friction, slowing the craft to a more manageable but still dangerous 1,000 miles per hour. Next, the supersonic parachute deployed and the heat shield dropped, revealing instruments used to map the ground beneath it. The parachute slowed it down to about 200 miles per hour, but the Martian air is not thick enough to slow it down much more. The parachute was no longer useful and its fixed rear shell was discarded. The retrorockets slow the spacecraft to a standstill, but they are unable to touch the ground. Instead, they stopped about 20 meters above the ground, and a device called a Skycrane lowered the rover the rest of the way.

The crane then flew backwards, crashing a safe distance away. Between the heat shield, the parachute and back shell, and the sky crane, there’s a ton of wreckage to move around.

Ingenuity captured part of the Perseverance landing wreckage

While it’s uncertain whether Ingenuity will be useful on Mars, it has quickly become an important part of the mission. Not only is it cool to have a small helicopter flying around Mars – Ingenuity is the only vehicle to achieve controlled flight on another world to date – but it also provides a unique perspective on the Martian terrain. a novel perspective.

Ingenuity was originally planned to fly only five times, but it performed so well that scientists have continued to fly it. As of this writing, it has flown through red skies more than 60 times and counting. It was during one of these bonus flights that Ingenuity tracked down some of its own wreckage and photographed the crime scene.

NASA has expanded its Ingenuity flight operations to conduct such groundbreaking flights. With each liftoff, Ingenuity explores new territories and provides perspectives not possible with previous planetary missions. Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuitys team leader at JPL, said in a statement that the Mars Sample Return Reconnaissance Request is a perfect example of the utility of Mars aerial platforms.

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The Mars Sample Return Project team requested these images to inform future landing missions. Any sample return mission will need to land on Mars and lift off again, so understanding the performance of previous landing equipment can inform the design of this and other future missions.

Ingenuity lifted off at 11:37 a.m. local Mars time and flew for 159 seconds. It rose to an altitude of about 8 meters (26 feet) and flew over the area, taking photos from multiple angles. The image shows the supersonic parachute and attached back shell. Scientists estimate the rear shell hit the ground at a speed of 126 kilometers (78 miles) per hour. That was fast and hard enough to cause some noticeable damage, but left the device relatively unscathed. Engineers noted that the protective coating, parachutes and many suspension lines appeared to be intact after the descent and crash landing.

The potential engineering value of these images is difficult to quantify, but the value of cool stuff to the human scrapbook is limitless. We’re looking at part of a crashed spaceship on another planet, and we’re the aliens responsible.

Granted, it rarely ends well when aliens crash-land here. Watch the first two seasons of Resident Alien live on Peacock now.