Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Wins Aviation Collier Trophy

The story got past me when it was first announced because it was in Machine Design and not one of the space news sites I regularly cruise, but in mid June, the team that developed the Ingenuity helicopter that flew to Mars with the Perseverance rover was awarded the prestigious Collier Trophy from the National Aeronautic Association.  The award, of course, is for being the first vehicle to fly on another planet.  For more than a century, the Collier Trophy has been awarded annually to mark the major achievements in aviation. 

The helicopter was developed by a team of engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), AeroVironment, and maxon.

The helicopter was built by AeroVironment, a company that specializes in unmanned air vehicles, under contract from JPL. Maxon provided six precision DC motors, each with a diameter of only 10 mm; they move the swashplates on the rotors. Swashplates, which are found on all helicopters, adjust the angle of the rotor blades and control the helicopter’s flightpath. The Perseverance rover, the spacecraft that carried the helicopter to the surface of Mars, also relies on maxon motors to collect and store soil samples that will be retrieved from Mars on a future NASA mission.

As we've been talking about since the first mention of the helicopter, flying on Mars isn't like flying on Earth. While Ingenuity never flew more than 40 feet above the surface, that's equivalent to nearly 100,000 feet altitude on Earth and one doesn't see helicopters up there.  This means the helicopter had to be extremely light, and it weighs in at just under 4 lb.  The weight limitations meant the solar-charged batteries and maxon DC motors also had to be light and highly energy efficient.   A measure of the success of the mission is that it started out as an experiment to answer if can we make something that can fly on Mars and do something useful.  The initial goal was five test flights.  They've flown 27.  It has been so successful, the idea of using a helicopter is moving into problem solving on other missions.  

The motors strike me as the "stars of the show" since they're driving the propellers, and a more recent article says those motors are 10mm in diameter and 20mm long.  That's a bit bigger than 3/8" diameter by 3/4" long - bigger in both directions.  Machine Design has a separate article on the motor development, in an interview between one of their editors, Rehana Begg, and Florbela Costa, the project manager for the development of the motors.   The video interview is 16 minutes long, and the discussion is worth listening to, although not very detailed about the engineering.  I'm pretty sure maxon would consider much of that proprietary.  It drifts into more of an interview with Ms. Costa about her background and the job position after the 10 minute mark.

Florbela Costa holding up an equivalent motor to the ones powering Ingenuity.  Screen capture from the video on Machine Design that I can't embed here.  Ms. Costa has a bit of a Portuguese accent, but I had no trouble understanding her.