“This tech can even be leveraged in the future for other lightweight deployables that can’t use traditional connectors,“ said Morrey. This was critical to the team, since they were dealing with such a delicate object that wasn’t meant to withstand additional weight. The new connector technology uses commercial off-the-shelf products to transmit many electrical signals while adding zero mass to the helicopter. The process of designing the MHDS even led to the program filing two patents: one for a miniaturized structural launch lock restraint, and the other for a brand-new electrical connection system for the helicopter. “And we leveraged a broad diversity of talent at Lockheed Martin in order to make this happen.” The solar system has never seen anything like Ingenuity before,” said Morrey. “It ended up being quite a collaboration. With Ingenuity itself weighing a featherweight four pounds, the team had to design creatively to protect the fragile aircraft without adding too much weight to the rover. “We had a wicked challenge to do more with less.” “We had to figure out how to hold onto all the moving parts with minimal rover resources such as actuation signals available to us,” recalled Jeremy Morrey, Lockheed Martin MHDS principal engineer. JPL provided constraints on how much power the team could use, what signals were available, the amount of space the MHDS could take up and how much the system could weigh. Lockheed Martin was up for the challenge.Ī lean-but-mighty team got to work ideating and building the Mars Helicopter Delivery System (MHDS), designed to transport and deploy Ingenuity for flight on the Red Planet. They thought Perseverance might be able to carry the helicopter - named Ingenuity - to Mars, but only if a viable deployment solution could be completed in short order. The helicopter was a potential late addition to the Perseverance Mars rover, but the JPL team had their hands full with the intense task of completing the helicopter itself. When NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) needed to safely transport the world’s first non-Earth helicopter to Mars via deep space travel, the team faced quite the puzzle.
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