Space helicopters will help us explore Mars and other worlds. Here's how.

太空直升机将帮助我们探索火星和其他星球。以下是方法。

When NASA scientists were planning the Mars Perseverance mission, they decided to try something new: Instead of just sending a rover, they'd also send up a small helicopter. Although originally intended as a simple technology demonstration, the aircraft Ingenuity has far exceeded expectations.

当美国宇航局的科学家们计划”火星毅力“任务时，他们决定尝试一些新的东西：他们不仅发射了一辆漫游车，还发射了一架小型直升机。尽管最初的目的仅仅只是简单的技术演示，但匠心飞机的独创性已经远远超出了人们的预期。

"It did such a good job in fact that even though we originally were meant to fly only up to five times on Mars, we got a new mission," Håvard Grip, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California who is the aerodynamics and flight control lead and the chief pilot for the Ingenuity helicopter, said during a news conference during the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting being held this week in Chicago and virtually. Ingenuity would now help scout ahead for the Perseverance rover, scoping out the landscape from the air.

Håvard Grip是美国宇航局喷气推进实验室(JPL)的工程师，他是空气动力学和飞行控制的负责人，也是“独创性”直升机的首席飞行员，他在本周在芝加哥举行的美国地球物理联合会秋季会议的新闻发布会上说:“事实上，它做得很好，尽管我们最初只打算在火星上飞行五次，但我们得到了一个新的任务。”“匠心”号现在将帮助前方寻找“毅力”号火星车，从空中观察地形。

In fact, Ingenuity has been so successful that scientists are already gearing up to use successor helicopters to explore Mars and beyond, including how future helicopters could further explore and even sample the Martian environment and how NASA's Dragonfly mission to Saturn's moon Titan will utilize a helicopter to help us study an entirely different world.

事实上，“创造力”非常成功，科学家们已经在准备使用后续直升机探索火星和其他地方，包括未来的直升机如何进一步探索火星环境，甚至对火星环境进行采样，以及美国宇航局飞往土星卫星泰坦的蜻蜓任务将如何利用直升机帮助我们研究一个完全不同的世界。

Related: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover's 1st year on Mars

相关内容:毅力号探测器在火星的第一年拍摄的12张令人惊叹的照片

Although its first flight was a demonstration that lasted only 39 seconds, Ingenuity has now not only scouted for Perseverance, but also taken detailed photographs of a Martian outcrop, helping scientists to create a 3D model to study the area. It also photographed Perseverance's landing equipment to give engineers a valuable look at their work on the equipment after it had been used.

尽管它的第一次飞行仅仅持续了39秒，但“匠心”现在不仅探测了“毅力”号，还拍摄了火星露头的详细照片，帮助科学家创建了一个3D模型来研究该地区。它还拍摄了毅力号的着陆设备，让工程师们有价值地了解他们在设备使用后的工作。

During the briefing, Grip described how Ingenuity team members made a pilot's logbook for the helicopter before landing on Mars and added lots of extra pages because they thought a five-page logbook would look silly.

在发布会上，Grip描述了匠心团队成员如何在登陆火星前为直升机制作飞行员日志，并增加了很多额外的页面，因为他们认为五页的日志看起来很傻。

"But guess what? We are out of pages," he said, holding up the book. "As of two days ago, Ingenuity made its 36th flight, and there are 36 pages in here."

“但是你猜怎么着?我们没有纸了，”他说着，举起了那本书。“两天前，匠心号进行了第36次飞行，这里面有36页。”

NASA scientists are aiming to build on Ingenuity's success by developing an aircraft that can collect sample tubes from the Martian surface. This Mars Sample Return Sample Recovery Helicopter would be based on Ingenuity's design but would boast wheels for navigating on the ground, as well as a robotic arm.

美国宇航局的科学家们旨在通过开发一种可以从火星表面收集样本管的飞机来建立独创性的成功。这架火星样本返回样本回收直升机将基于独创性的设计，但将拥有用于在地面导航的轮子，以及一个机械臂。

The upgrades would allow two of the new helicopters to collect sample tubes, serving as a backup for Perseverance, which is meant to deliver the tubes to the sample-return lander, said Teddy Tzanetos, who is an engineer at JPL, the engineering team lead for Ingenuity and the manager for the new sample recovery helicopters mission, during the briefing.

JPL的工程师泰迪·扎内托斯（Teddy Tzanetos）在简报会上说，升级将允许两架新直升机收集样本管，作为毅力号的备份，毅力号旨在将试管运送到样本返回着陆器，泰迪·扎内托斯是独创性工程团队的负责人，也是新样本回收直升机任务的经理。

"We are largely leveraging all of the amazing lessons learned — that we have learned and will continue to learn with ingenuity over the last year and a half," he said.

“我们在很大程度上利用了所有令人惊叹的经验教训——在过去一年半的时间里，我们已经学到了这些经验教训，并将继续以独创性学习，”他说。

Mars isn't the only world NASA will explore with an aircraft. NASA's Dragonfly mission, currently scheduled for a 2027 launch, will use a rotorcraft to explore Saturn's icy moon Titan. The only moon in the solar system with an atmosphere, Titan is ideal for aerial exploration: because it has a weaker gravity and half again the atmospheric pressure of Earth, Titan is an extremely easy place to fly. In fact, it's so much easier to fly on Titan than Mars that Dragonfly is about the size of the Perseverance rover — like a small SUV. In contrast, Ingenuity is only about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) tall and 6 inches (15 centimeters) wide (not counting its blades), closer to the size of small remote-controlled drones on Earth.

火星并不是美国宇航局将用飞机探索的唯一世界。美国宇航局的蜻蜓任务，目前计划于2027年发射，将使用旋翼机探索土星的冰卫星土卫六。土卫六是太阳系中唯一有大气层的卫星，非常适合空中探索：因为它的重力较弱，大气压力是地球的一半，所以土卫六是一个非常容易飞行的地方。事实上，在土卫六上飞行比在火星上容易得多，蜻蜓的大小和毅力漫游者差不多——就像一辆小型SUV。相比之下，独创性只有大约1.6英尺（0.5米）高，6英寸（15厘米）宽（不算它的叶片），更接近地球上小型遥控无人机的尺寸。

Scientists want to visit Titan for several reasons, Elizabeth Turtle, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland and the principal investigator for the Dragonfly mission, said during the news conference. Not only does Titan have a water-ice crust and seas of liquid methane reminiscent of water on Earth, Turtle said, it also has abundant carbon-rich chemistry, like that found in life on Earth.

马里兰州约翰·霍普金斯应用物理实验室的行星科学家、蜻蜓任务的首席研究员伊丽莎白·图特尔（Elizabeth Turtle）在新闻发布会上说，科学家们想要访问土卫六有几个原因。Turtle说，土卫六不仅有水冰外壳和液态甲烷海洋，让人想起地球上的水，它还拥有丰富的富含碳的化学物质，就像在地球上的生命中发现的那样。

Studying Titan will give scientists a look at this familiar chemistry in a totally different context, enabling them to study whether certain conditions are habitable and might have led to life. To do this, Dragonfly will be equipped with scientific instruments including spectrometers, a drill for collecting samples, geophysics and meteorology sensors and a camera.

研究土卫六将让科学家在完全不同的背景下审视这种熟悉的化学物质，使他们能够研究某些条件是否适合居住，是否可能导致生命。为此，蜻蜓将配备科学仪器，包括光谱仪、收集样本的钻机、地球物理和气象传感器以及相机。

"Fundamentally, Dragonfly is a chemistry mission," Turtle said. "Titan has been doing the kind of chemistry experiments we can't do here on Earth, because we don't have millions of years in the laboratory to do them. So Titan has been doing these for us, and Dragonfly is designed to pick up the results of those experiments."

“从根本上说，蜻蜓是一个化学任务，”Turtle说。“土卫六一直在做我们在地球上做不到的化学实验，因为我们没有几百万年的时间在实验室里做这些实验。所以土卫六一直在为我们做这些，蜻蜓被设计来获取这些实验的结果。”

In the future, aircraft could play other import roles for planetary exploration. Helicopters could take samples from areas without leaving the sort of track marks and disturbances that a rover would, which could be especially important in areas scientists call "biologically sensitive." NASA scientists are also developing a design for a future Mars Science Helicopter, which like Dragonfly would be the size of Perseverance and would be able to carry heavier samples and scientific instruments.

在未来，飞机可以在行星探索中扮演其他重要的角色。直升机可以从一些地区采集样本，而不会像漫游车那样留下痕迹和干扰，这在科学家称之为“生物敏感”的地区尤为重要。美国宇航局的科学家也在为未来的火星科学直升机开发设计，这种直升机像蜻蜓一样大小，能够携带更重的样本和科学仪器。

"My personal dream is one day we'll have astronauts at Mars and there'll be fleets of vehicles zipping around helping the first humans there with simple and complicated tasks," Tzanetos said. "But it all started with that first 39-second flight that we did about a year and a half ago."

Tzanetos说：“我个人的梦想是有一天我们将有宇航员在火星上，将有车队快速地帮助第一批到达那里的人类完成简单和复杂的任务。”“但这一切都始于大约一年半前我们第一次39秒的飞行。”

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