Teddy Tzanetos shares his project management experiences and lessons learned from leading the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter demonstration mission, the first test of powered, controlled flight on another world.
: Welcome to Small Steps, Giant Leaps, the NASA APPEL Knowledge Services podcast. I’m Andres Almeida, your new host moving forward. In each episode, we focus on the role NASA’s technical workforce plays in advancing the agency’s mission through the development and sharing of knowledge.
: Yeah. First off, helicopters here on Earth are miracles to begin with, right? The fact that they operate at all and they don’t explode every time they start spinning up really is a mechanical marvel. I encourage listeners to go online and look at videos search for the term “squash plate” and you’ll find some videos of the helicopter mechanism moving in the middle of flight. So that’s tough on its own. But we figured that out here at Earth.
: Yeah. A lot. And we’re still learning. The team, actually later on this afternoon, there’ll be some meetings that I’m going to attend, where our GNC team and our mechanical team are still digging through the data to try and better our understanding. We will never know, likely, the full, you know, cause analysis, root cause analysis rather, of what occurred.
And it had transformed into a marathon. And now you’re looking at your laptop screen, at an image of a shadow of a broken blade, and you’re thinking to yourself, Okay, this may be the end. Myself, personally, I was in disbelief. At first, I thought it was just some visual tricks being played. In my mind, I said, “No, no, the blade’s fine. It’s just a shadow. There’s probably a hill or the weird angle that the sun’s coming in on, she’s fine. We’ll spin up the blades.
We’re also now carrying those lessons forward into even larger endeavors, where we’re designing multicopters that we call the chopper team, we call it, and the goal there is to design a multicopter, you can imagine a hexacopter, so six rotors arranged in a ring. And in the center, you have your fuselage. This thing is huge. It’s about the size bigger actually, than Perseverance itself. This would be the only thing in the rocket if we were to send this to Mars.
And that third one, you know the autonomy I think 72 flights speaks for itself. Clearly, we have a robust flight control system, autonomy system; and not just the software, but the team and the operations that were developed to transform that 30-Sol sprint into the marathon. It’s a well-oiled machine here, ready and willing to keep flying in the skies of Mars.: On episode 88 of this podcast Ingenuity’s chief pilot Håvard Grip mentioned his favorite moments of the demonstration mission.
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