Tag: Perseverance

Poor Little Ginny

Next Tuesday, if I could drag myself out of bed before dawn, I’d see the planet Venus hole-punched into the inky sky, low and bright. If I looked further I’d probably see Mars – dim but distinctly red. And if I really did see Mars I’d be sad, because I know Ginny’s up there, all alone, waiting for someone to bring her home. I’m sorry, Ginny… I’m so sorry.  Nobody’s coming for you, not for a long, long time. Rest your rotors in peace, little helicopter.

“Ginny”

Ginny (known more formally as Ingenuity) is a brave little helicopter.  She may look like a nasty bug instead of something you’d want to cuddle with, but she’s quietly been filling up the record books with her remarkable achievements.  Four years ago Ginny hitched a ride to Mars on the belly of NASA rover “Perseverance”.  A few months after Percy plunked down on Mars, Ginny took her “first steps”.  She spun her rotor blade into a blur, rose ten feet above the Martian soil, took a quick look around, and dropped right back to where she started.  That brief maneuver earned her the title: “first powered, controlled, extraterrestrial flight by any aircraft”.

[Note: You can read about Ginny’s first flight in the post Whirlybird Wonder]

Ginny may not be easy on the eyes but I’m in awe of what she accomplished in her brief time on Earth (er, Mars).  I should’ve paid better attention in science class.  Imagine the teacher saying, “Okay Dave, here’s your assignment.  I need you to design a mini-copter that can travel to Mars, perform a few lighter-than-air maneuvers, and be able to take a few photos at the same time.  You’ll be at the controls back here on earth, so whatever communication mechanism you come up with needs to work over, uh, 140 million miles.” Cue my blank stare.

The smarter-than-I-am people at California’s Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL) designed little Ginny to do all those things.  What makes her ten-foot hop on Mars so remarkable is this: the atmosphere up there is less than 1% as dense as Earth’s, so there very little to hold Ginny aloft.  To put it another way, earthly helicopters can only fly to 25,000 feet.  Ginny had to be designed to fly to 80,000.

Let’s call her “The Little Copter That Could”, shall we?  Ginny was supposed to fly five times in thirty days.  Five little hops in a month’s time and her mission would’ve been considered an unqualified success.  But Ginny chose to be an explorer instead of an experiment.  She flew seventy-two individual missions, further and longer each time than her JPL designers ever expected.  She also captured images as she flew, so scientists could better decide where on Mars they wanted big-brother Percy to rove.

Ginny’s a good photographer!

Ginny was more “alive” than any helicopter I’ve ever known.  She cleaned herself up after nasty Martian dust storms.  Her solar panels froze unexpectedly during the rough winters, rendering her unable to fly or even take commands, yet she still radioed “wellness reports” to Percy so the JPL people would know she was (barely) there.  She made three emergency landings when her sensors detected trouble.  And even when one of those sensors went dead, Ginny kept her rotors a-whirling on demand.

Ginny captured the shadow of her “broken wing”

Whatever happened on Ginny’s Flight #72 two weeks ago remains a mystery, one Percy hopes to figure out as he rovers back to her location.  Ginny had been close to another landing when she suddenly stopped communicating.  A day later the JPL team reestablished the connection to find Ginny resting comfortably on the Martian soil.  Somehow she’d still landed on her feet.  Somehow however, she also damaged a rotor blade.  Ginny can’t repair herself so alas, her flying days are over.  Now her waiting days begin.

Admirers like me refer to Ginny as “that little extraterrestrial trailblazer”.  Haters call the dormant helicopter “the first piece of trash on Mars”.  As long as Percy’s in her neighborhood, Ginny will keep sending her little wellness reports (even though she’s really not so well).  I just hope the scientists at JPL are already hard at work on their next mission to Mars.  A brave little copter is waiting to be rescued and brought home to the Smithsonian.

Some content sourced from the CNN article, “After damaging a rotor blade, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter mission ends on Mars”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

 

Whirlybird Wonder

“Ginny”

If you haven’t been following the dog-and-pony pony-and-dog show taking place on Mars the last couple of months, you might want to break out the telescope. Not that you’ll be able to see a car-sized rover or a toy-sized helicopter from millions of miles away. But you can see Mars itself, and then you can imagine “Percy” and “Ginny” sniffing around the red dirt and rocks up there. They’re just sampling things to see if Mars can roll out the welcome mat to humans someday.

The rover “Perseverance” is the pony in this show; “Ingenuity” the dog. I want to talk about the dog. Last July Percy hitched a nine-month ride to Mars, launching from Florida’s Cape Canaveral aboard a massive Atlas V rocket. Little Ginny hitched a ride on Percy; she the steadfast little soldier clinging to the rover’s underbelly. Considering Ginny measures only a few feet in all dimensions, it must’ve been a hang-on-for-dear-life E-ticket kind of adventure.

I’d love to make this a children’s story, but Ginny is anything but soft and cuddly. Have a look. She’s about as cute as a wasp. Consider Martian atmosphere is only 1/100th as dense as that of Earth, which means Ginny has virtually nothing to grab onto to sustain flight. But she whirls at five times the rate of a regular helicopter (2,400 rpm!), and then she rises.  Product safety warning: don’t go anywhere near Ginny’s rotor blades.

Ten days ago Ginny lifted off Mars to a skyscraping height of ten feet.  Then she hovered briefly before rotating about ninety degrees, kind of just observing the Mars-scape.  Finally, she landed.  The whole exercise lasted less than forty seconds.  Big deal, right?  Well, that little maneuver qualified Ginny as “the first powered controlled flight by an aircraft on a planet besides Earth”. Way to go, little wasp.  You just reserved a spot in the Smithsonian after you return home.

Will Ginny end up here?

When I picture Ginny clinging to the rover Percy, then hurtling through outer space for months on end, my middle-aged mind recalled the old Thunderbirds television show.  Thunderbirds featured the Tracy family (marionettes!) and their fleet of wicked-cool space vehicles.  The five Thunderbirds included a giant green supersonic carrier (“Thunderbird Two”), whose massive belly carried a yellow utility submersible (“Thunderbird Four”).  Kind of like Percy carried Ginny.  Trust me young(er) readers, Thunderbirds was awesome television in the 1960s… even if it was just puppets getting their strings pulled.

I’ve ridden in a helicopter exactly once in my life, on our honeymoon over the Napali Coast on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.  I turned to my bride mid-flight and probably uttered some not-so-nice words as I remembered how much I dislike heights.  The glass of champagne beforehand certainly helped.  For me, the fear has always been a toss-up between vertigo (physical) or the idea that terra firma is far, far below me (mental).  No matter the reason, heights just aren’t my cup of tea.

My acrophobia probably goes back to my first ride on a Ferris Wheel, with adolescent nightmares of slipping through the metal lap bar and taking an unplanned skydive.  Or ski lifts, where a little bit of fiddling with the lap bar latch could mean the end of everything.  Parasailing? (No).  Hang-gliding? (Never).  Hot-air balloons? (Why even ask?).  Sorry – airplanes aside, and only the bigger ones mind you – I prefer my thrills securely grounded.

For all the recent broadcast news on Percy and Ginny, I can’t seem to find the part of the story where Ginny returns to Percy, who then returns to the Atlas V rocket, who then returns to Earth.  I’m looking for the part about splashdowns and photo ops and ticker-tape parades – the happy-ending kind of stuff.  My earlier comment about a spot in the Smithsonian may have been a little premature (can you say, “Ginny replica”?).  Note to reader: if you do decide to make this a children’s story you might want to edit things a bit.  Just say our little pony and dog are now asleep on Mars, waiting for their human friends to get there someday.  It sounds much better than, “we just left them there”.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.