ONE SMALL LEAP FOR A TINY ROVER; ONE GIANT LEAP FOR

HUMANITY!

Sarang M
May 30, 2021
“Five, four, engine ignition, two, one and lift off as the count-down to Mars continues, the
perseverance of humanity launching the next generation of robotic explorers to the red
planet.”

And that was on July 30th, 2020 when the Atlas V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral in
Florida, carrying the state-of-the-art exploratory vehicles - The Perseverance Rover and the
Ingenuity Helicopter. It was nothing less than history, as the science and engineering joined
their hands achieving the remarkable feat. The Perseverance Rover is the heaviest
exploratory vehicle ever built by the JPL Laboratories, and the Ingenuity Helicopter is the
first aerial vehicle, which has ever flown in an alien world.

Perseverance is the culmination of lessons learned from past and the cutting-edge
technologies of present. It is not just an upgraded version of its predecessors such as the
Curiosity Rover, but a reinvention where different arenas of engineering shook their hands.
Its immediate predecessor the Curiosity had used shape memory alloy wheels with sharp
rectangular threads. Though the design of such a rover was made possible with many state-
of-the-art techniques of engineering, the Martian surface was not so forgiving for the
Curiosity Rover. Learning from mistakes, the scientists working for perseverance rover had
opted out the shape alloy wheels, and went for much larger wheels with curvier threads.
Furthermore, there were rectangular cut-outs in the wheels of the Curiosity Rover that
imprinted its origin in the Martian dust. These cut-outs were also removed from the
Perseverance Rover in hope of a more illustrious life in the harsh undulating and unforgiving
terrains of the red planet [ CITATION NAS20 \l 16393 ].

Perseverance’s ground navigation system is itself a testimony to the ground-breaking

researches and developments made in the field of deep learning and computer vision. The
data from the optical sensors onboard are fed to machine learning algorithms in the system,
which will definitely help the rover to find its own path, while scouring for the remnants of an
age-old Martian civilization in Jazero Crater.

Moreover, the challenges faced in flying an aerial vehicle in another planet, where the
density of atmosphere is merely one hundredth of that in Earth are inconceivable. To
generate the required amount of lift in a thin atmosphere, the profile of the blade has to be
scrupulously designed giving utmost attention to the increased speeds at which the
Ingenuity’s rotor has to rotate [ CITATION NAS201 \l 16393 ]. The process of designing
such an aerial vehicle is far too complex even for a group of established aerospace
engineers. This remarkable feat has been accomplished by NASA after more than a year of
tireless days and sleepless nights. 
References
NASA. (2020, July). Mars 2020 Mission: Perseverance rover. Retrieved from Nasa Sciences:
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
NASA. (2020, July). Mars Helicopter Tech Demo. Retrieved from NASA Sciences:
mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/overview