The Real Reason NASA Is Developing 100s of Mars Helicopter Drones!

on today's episode we are getting into the latest space news including nasa's plans to use robot helicopters to help search for life on mars elon talks about raptor 2 refits after the recent explosion and china's plan to shoot a rocket at an asteroid there's lots to go over this week so let's get going this is the space race let's put ourselves in nasa's shoes for a moment it's 2022 and that means that we are coming up on a crucial milestone for our mars sample return mission we've got a rover called perseverance on the martian surface drilling core samples for later retrieval samples that could find traces of life and that's a pretty big deal what's more we have this well thought out plan for a lander that will grab those samples and send them home but every year we have to prove to a government committee that our plans are feasible and this mission is already more expensive than it was supposed to be here's where things get interesting during this year's meeting the committee tells us that they are impressed not by our rover or our lander plans but by our little helicopter experiment called ingenuity that was the situation nasa found themselves in during a budget draft meeting in late june when the house appropriations committee suggested that the space agency should look into using a fleet of martian helicopter drones to assist the collection phase of their mission ingenuity was a test to see if flight was possible on mars a planet that has an atmosphere less than one percent as dense as earth's to compensate ingenuity was equipped with two sets of four foot long carbon fiber foam core blades a solar panel fuels the avionics sensors antennas and the onboard battery all of that tech having been tuned to fly the helicopter with minimal to no input from nasa techs who it should be noted need a half an hour turnaround for any signals sent to mars and despite that tremendous engineering challenge ingenuity proved it could fly in 980 foot hps about 10 to 15 feet in the air for up to 90 seconds beating the wright brothers first flight by a good 78 seconds or so the little four pound flying robot hitched a ride to mars in the perseverance rover's belly and was only expected to last a month or possibly up to five flights but the prototype robot has lasted over a year now and just recently completed its 29th flight ingenuity proves that we can not only achieve lift on mars reliably but cheaply too ingenuity costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 million dollars to build and operate stunningly cheaper than perseverance 2.7 billion originally nasa's mars sample return mission was to be completed sometime this decade by sending a lander capable of launching a payload of core samples into martian orbit and sending it home to earth the lander would be equipped with fetch rovers which would have the job of running to perseverance and back to the lander ferrying the sample tubes collected and sealed by the large rover since it started drilling in september of 2021 and now congress thinks they should redesign that platform to make use of this unexpectedly successful aircraft going with nasa's theme of redundancy the committee suggests sending more than one ingenuity-class mars helicopters in case some of them fail with some design changes it could be possible for the little robots to pick up and deliver perseverance's core sample tubes much easier than land-based rovers aside from the complexity of the ingenuity helicopters this plan is actually a good one even with modifications ingenuity would weigh much less than any of the mars rovers even sojourner the first wheeled rover on mars weighed over six times that of ingenuity and the helicopters may have the same difficulties with martian dust but because they don't turn up the ground as they go they get less of it in their mechanisms which might be why ingenuity lasted so much longer than nasa thought so yeah replacing the retrieval rovers with ingenuity class drones would likely help the viability of the mission but all of this work has to be for something we wouldn't be spending billions of dollars just to transport some red rocks home the mars sample mission is also looking for signs of life we know a fair bit about mars these days but even when we didn't scientists were hopeful about finding signs of life on our apparently dead neighbor even microbes would go a long way to giving us insight into how life forms and help us prepare to step into a seemingly hostile galaxy and so rover after rover along with satellites and landers have been gathering data to that purpose they've been sniffing out water geological formations and now drilling but we haven't been finding much mostly planetary scientists are looking for really basic signs amino acids these basic chemicals are always present when life forms and can be an indication that processes were at least getting started on mars before things went bad and we know that mars had them because we found traces of molecules on meteorites from the red planet like the martian meteorite we found in antarctica in 2004 these chunks of martian rock were flung into space by huge impacts that are like little time capsules showing us the chemical composition of a mars that was perhaps warm and rich with water but we haven't found any on mars itself yet and nasa scientists at the goddard space flight center have recently come up with a good theory as to why apparently we aren't digging down far enough sometime in the distant past mars lost its magnetosphere the protective magnetic field that keeps a planet safe from solar radiation without it every time the sun coughed or the universe just felt like it cosmic rays almost scoured our red neighbor's atmosphere clean off the planet without a strong atmosphere liquid water couldn't form on the surface and of course neither could life worse than that however is that ionizing solar radiation is particularly good at destroying amino acids and over time mars's surface was scrubbed completely clean which is why perseverance was made to dig about two inches below the surface well the new research also has bad news on that front the team at goddard mixed up some simulated martian soil with various mixtures of amino acids and water stored them at different martian temperatures and then blasted them with gamma radiation to simulate cosmic rays alexander pavlov of nasa's goddard space flight center explains their findings saying quote our results suggest that amino acids are destroyed by cosmic rays in the martian surface at much faster rates than previously thought current mars rover missions drill down to about 2 inches at those depths it would take only 20 million years to destroy amino acids completely end quote and since we're pretty sure mars lost its magnetosphere way before that we're not likely to find even amino acid leftovers at the depths perseverance is drilling at but this doesn't mean perseverance is a wasted mission aside from the invaluable science we'd get from being able to finally test martian regolith and rocks there is a way for shallow drilling machines to possibly get samples from the right depth pavlov recommends finding recently exposed outcrops recently here being a relative term craters or geological outcrops with ages less than 10 million years old have the potential to have ejected the appropriate material to the surface or at least provide access to the deeper dirt we need to poke at now perseverance has been specifically looking around a location called gizero crater and could very well have already picked up traces of martian amino acids by happy coincidence but we won't be sure until the sample return container hits our atmosphere sometime in the early 2030s so yeah maybe perseverance missed the boat but we should remember that everything done on mars so far has built to this moment we sent several rovers and landers found water and learned to fly on an alien planet even if perseverance ultimately doesn't find what we're looking for it has already advanced our understanding of mars and our own capabilities and aside from ensuring those core samples get home for testing this funding suggestion from the government could be the start of a fleet of automated aircraft drones not just for mars but anywhere with an atmosphere that could support flight everyone is talking about the recent explosion at spacex's boko chica starbase testing facility last week as a quick refresher last wednesday the 13th spacex began a spin prime test of booster 7. basically the techs wind up the engine turbo pumps which cycle fuel into the raptors but that's it well planned or not it seems the excess vented fuel ignited causing a sizeable explosion luckily nothing seems to be damaged but booster 7 still had to be moved back to the high bay for inspection and repairs not too big of an issue considering ship 24 was ready to be swapped out for its own spin prime test but it is worth going over the updates to procedures that this incident caused the spin prime test is designed to test the turbo pumps which is done by pumping cryogenic fuel through the apparatus this requires some venting as the fuel hits oxygen and can become a fuel air explosion risk as ceo elon musk explained in a tweet response afterwards in this case cycling the amount of engines they did caused the venting to saturate the air too heavily and boom so in response the new procedures for spin prime test will reportedly prohibit testing all engines at once and will include a method to burn off excess fuel instead of just venting it but procedures aren't the only updates to the raptor 2 that are coming soon in the flurry of questions for musk on twitter the ceo spoke briefly about the new thrust vector control system the mechanisms that allow some of the installed raptor 2 engines to pivot and help steer a rocket in a brief thread between elon tim the everyday astronaut and scott manley musk spouted off a couple of sentences about some changes to the raptor 2 structures that are intended for weight savings among them the change in the usual thrust vector control systems from the bulkier hydraulic ones normally used to some new lighter electric ones which musk revealed take power from onboard batteries systems inside the combustion chambers of the engines can provide a lot of power to a rocket but as elon explained spacex needs to ensure the tvc is working even if the engines aren't on so batteries it is while the change to the electric tvc wasn't spurred by the explosion it is evidence of iteration brought on by testing just like the new procedures it's something we knew we were going to see as spacex got closer and closer to their orbital test date so we should expect more changes going forward as the techs at starbase come across situations they haven't seen before overall not a big issue maybe just a later flight date and some spectacular imagery let's hope spacex finds all the issues now instead of during the orbital flight test okay so we know asteroids are a potentially huge problem those rocks might be big but in the vastness of space it's really hard to spot them against a black backdrop but there are lots of programs making surprisingly efficient headway on that front so what do we do if the worst happens what do we do if we spot one coming right at us well china is throwing their hat into the international ring to see if they can help solve this particular problem and like the other space agencies their first thought is to test well just hitting the thing with a rocket the target is a near-earth object codified as 2020 pn1 a school bus sized asteroid which is temporarily in our orbit but not dangerous the chinese space agency is planning on sending a long march 3b rocket with two vehicles on board an orbiter to collect data and an impactor to do some smashing this whole mission is to test the simplest concept we have for how to deflect an incoming asteroid and is due to launch sometime in 2026. this particular mission seems to be taking cues from the joint nasa and isa missions to didymus a large asteroid in near-earth proximity and smash into its moon dimorphos this mission called dart or double asteroid redirection test was launched on a falcon 9 back in november of 2021 and aims to do the same thing as the chinese space agency is about to try smashing nasa's dart probe into dimorphose while the esa's hera probe will observe china's mission is slightly different as aside from launching two vehicles at once their impactor is a little more complex the idea is for their assembled kinetic impactor or aki to gather more mass once in orbit around the target object by collecting the smaller rocks that often linger around an asteroid then using the added mass to have more of a punch definitely a cool idea but more than that the chinese national space administration hopes this mission will be just one of many that will address the threat of asteroid impacts namely by establishing an early warning system hey simple ideas are often the best to try and if this works nasa esa and the cnsa will have earth's first working plan to deal with an asteroid should the worst happen we're just sad it doesn't involve drilling meet us back here every week for more updates on everything aerospace industry and interstellar exploration related make sure to give the video a thumbs up today if you liked it that really helps us out for real and subscribe to the space race for more videos just like this we do one long form essay and one news update every week and if you'd like more we've got two more on the screen for you right

Channel: The Space Race

Views: 236,259

Keywords: NASA, mars, life on mars, alien life, ingenuity rover mars, space news, space update, space news 2022

Id: z1OjuMS_H6M

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 20 2022