NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover launched last week carrying a stow-away -- a tiny helicopter named Ingenuity. If it works, it will be the first helicopter on another world and engineers and scientists are eagerly awaiting the results of the test flight, calling it Mars’ Wright Brother moment.
Ingenuity might be the first, but it certainly won’t be the last. Work is underway on another off-planet helicopter named Dragonfly, with a plan to send it to Saturn’s moon Titan in 2027.
So why helicopters? And what challenges must engineers overcome to fly on another world? We’ll speak with Mike Kinzel, an assistant professor in UCF’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering who’s working on the Dragonfly vehicle.
Then, a space-based telescope has discovered a planet orbiting two suns. They’re called circumbinary planets and if we were on the surface, we’d see a sunset similar to the fictional home of Luke Skywalker on Tatooine.
Our panel of expert scientists explain the physics of two-star systems and why they’re more common in the universe than we might expect.
