Why The Mars Helicopter Won't Fly at Night

The Mars helicopter, ‘Ingenuity’, along with the new rover ‘Perseverance’ are scheduled to land on February 18th 2021. The local time on Mars will be approximately 3.45pm at Jezero Crater. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab have stated the best time to fly Ingenuity is around 11am local time, and flying at night will be strictly forbidden.

Today’s video will feature all you need to know about flying on Mars, how Martian time zones are calculated and why flying at night is a bad idea. We hope you enjoy.

There is one standard time on Mars, developed by astronomers in the 1830’s. It’s called Mars Coordinated Time, or MTC for short. All of the rovers have offset times which correspond to MTC, which is known as the ‘Prime Meridian’.

So why does this matter? Why is it so important that we know the local time on Mars?

Just like on Earth, depending on where the Sun is in the sky, things change. Temperature, visibility, wind speeds, and even the density of the atmosphere.

Firstly, temperature variations on Mars are wild. In the Martian summer near the equator, temperatures can reach a cosy 20 Degrees Celsius. However, during the night temperatures can plummet to -73 Degrees Celsius. At these frosty temperatures, critical mechanisms on board the rovers can fail. For this reason, most Martian landers have built in heating systems, to survive the night time extremes.

This issue is what led to the demise of the Opportunity rover. After experiencing a global Martian dust storm which blocked it’s solar panels, the battery was expended. During the following days and nights, the heating system was unable to power up, meaning the extreme temperatures irreversibly damaged the rover’s internal components.

NASA have avoided this problem in future rovers, using nuclear power in rovers from Curiosity onwards.
The Mars helicopter ‘Ingenuity’, which we are nicknaming as ‘Genie’, has a multitude of other problems to answer. Unfortunately, using nuclear power would be too heavy for flying on Mars, so this craft uses solar.