NASA's Ingenuity helicopter completed three ambitious flights on Mars, and the Taiwan-born engineer Yen Jeng (嚴正), member of the NASA's Perseverance rover team, shared the behind the scenes stories during a virtual speech.
Accoring to FOCUS TAIWAN, Yen, a 20-year veteran at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is currently head of the agency's Robot Interfaces and Visualization team. The team is in charge of preparing the computer code that guides Perseverance's movements on Mars.
FOCUS TAIWAN reported, during a virtual speech, Yen said that the center of attention for the Perseverance rover mission has been the Ingenuity helicopter, which "hitchhiked" its way to Mars on the rover's belly.
"There are no repair shops on Mars," and so every step of the mission had to be repeatedly rehearsed, with no room for error, Yen said.
Just the release of the helicopter from the rover to the surface of Mars took 10 days and was extremely nerve-racking, he said, as there was a moment where it seemed the helicopter's antenna might snag on a dangling wire on the rover.
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The antenna is how the helicopter communicates with the rover, and if it broke, the entire mission would have had to be called off, he said.
To deal with the issue, the releasing process was on pause for two days, during which engineers at NASA reconfigured the rover's path to avoid a possible run-in, successfully averting the crisis, he said.
Since then, the helicopter has completed two flights on Mars, a planet with about one third of the Earth's gravity and an atmosphere that is around 1 percent as dense as that on Earth, according to Yen.
FOCUS TAIWAN mentions, the success of the helicopter represents a significant breakthrough in how humans can explore Mars, he said, as the distance humans can travel on the planet has increased fivefold.
Yen, a graduate of Jianguo High School in Taipei and National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, said that he was inspired to pursue a career related to space after seeing the Pathfinder rover land on Mars over 20 years ago.
As he was not particularly studious when he was young, Yen said he felt extremely lucky to be able to be a part of such a significant milestone for mankind.
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