Before Ingenuity ever landed on Mars, scientists almost managed to kill it

MiMi Aung could barely contain her excitement as she drove up Oak Grove Drive, the leafy thoroughfare leading to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

 

Aung had spent her formative years in Burma and Malaysia, two countries without a space program. A career in aerospace seemed beyond her reach. Yet here she was, at 22 years old, with a job interview to possibly work on the Deep Space Network. Aung dreamed of helping NASA intercept and amplify faint signals sent back to Earth from humanity's farthest-flung spacecraft, including the Voyagers.

 

"I remember it like it was yesterday," Aung said.

 

On that day in 1990, the math-loving engineer interviewed with prospective managers and visited facilities in the lab. It felt like home immediately. An energetic and enthusiastic person by nature, Aung spoke rapidly and asked a million questions. "You're like a kid in a candy store," one of the managers remarked. She was. Aung couldn't help herself. More than anywhere in the world, this is where she wanted to be.

 

She got the job. Over the next quarter of a century, Aung would work on the Deep Space Network and various other programs. Eventually, she became a manager, supervising the Guidance, Navigation & Control systems that help fly spacecraft.

 

In 2014, she was given a choice. Aung could remain as a manager—a plum position in the hierarchy at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)—or take over a fledgling project to develop a small helicopter that might one day fly on Mars.

 

Aung made the leap. She and a small team dove into the technical details of an almost impossible engineering challenge due to the exceptionally thin air on the red planet. But even as the team made progress, a formidable array of adversaries lined up against the program intended to hitch a ride on the Perseverance rover to Mars in 2020.

 

Again and again, at JPL, in the upper floors of NASA's headquarters building in Washington, DC, and in the halls of Congress, these critics attempted to kill Ingenuity. And on multiple occasions, they almost succeeded.

 

This is the inside story of how Aung and a few champions of flying on Mars ultimately prevailed.

The origin of Ingenuity

The mad scientists at JPL had been dreaming of flying on Mars for a while. An engineer named Bob Balaram started toying with the idea in the 1990s, and he and a small team received a bit of money to put pen to paper on the concept. But before they could begin building anything, the funding dried up. The project was put on ice for more than a decade.

 

It received new life in 2013 when the longtime director of JPL, a Lebanon-born scientist and engineer named Charles Elachi, was touring the guidance and navigation division. The group had about 1,000 employees—one of whom, Aung, was its deputy manager. She was shepherding Elachi and a senior engineer at the lab, Rene Fredat, around. After visiting the drone lab, they boarded a small bus to move to the next stop.

 

"Why aren't you flying drones or helicopters on Mars?" Elachi asked Fredat.

 

Neither he nor Aung had a good answer. So Elachi provided a bit of seed funding to Balaram and a few others to update their calculations from the 1990s and determine whether the miniaturization revolution spurred by mobile phone technology would make flying on Mars—where a vehicle had to be exceedingly light but capable of rotating its blades at thousands of revolutions per minute—possible.  Aung was asked to support the project as a side job.

 

 

Eventually, it took more and more of her time. In September 2014, Aung had to decide whether to remain in a managerial role of a large division or take on the helicopter project. Even then, ill political winds were stirring around the idea, which would take away precious space on the Perseverance rover from scientific experiments.

 

"In hindsight, I realize how big of a thing that was to give up," she said of the senior managerial role at JPL. "But at the time, I didn't think twice about it. I felt like I had something to give."

 

It was her big chance, so she grabbed it.

Trying to kill it

A few months before Aung agreed to take over management of the Mars helicopter project, NASA announced the seven "carefully selected" payloads that would accompany the Mars 2020 rover, as it was then known, down to the surface of the red planet. The payloads had been selected from among 58 proposals.

 

"The Mars 2020 rover, with these new advanced scientific instruments, including those from our international partners, holds the promise to unlock more mysteries of Mars’ past as revealed in the geological record," said John Grunsfeld, the leader of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, at the time.

 

The helicopter was not among the seven payloads. Why? Because it would not serve to advance the scientific research that was to be done on Mars. Principally, the rover would search for evidence of past life. To the scientists, a technology demonstration such as a helicopter was, at best, a nuisance. At worst, it could imperil the overall mission.

 

"The science community just wasn't interested in Ingenuity," said Bobby Braun, an aerospace engineer who worked on the Mars Pathfinder mission in the 1990s and who had a career in academia and government service.

 

Although the helicopter was not selected to fly on the Mars 2020 rover, Elachi wouldn't take no for an answer. He enlisted a trusted lieutenant at JPL, Jakob van Zyl, to shepherd the program. They found some internal funding to keep the project going. After Aung agreed to lead the technical aspects of the project, van Zyl set about taking care of the programmatic side of things.

 

He would take up the political fight to get the helicopter on the rover. Aung had to make it work.

The helicopter loses a key ally

In the summer of 2016, the helicopter program was dealt a serious blow. Its champion, Elachi, retired at the age of 69. Having led JPL for 15 years, he wielded enormous influence. Elachi had also cultivated a deep friendship with a Texas Republican in Congress, John Culberson, who chaired the US House subcommittee that set NASA's budget.

 

The pair had kept the mission alive even though it didn't have an official berth on the Mars 2020 mission, which had not yet been named Perseverance. With Elachi out of the picture, van Zyl soon ran into troubled waters.

 

A few months after Elachi's retirement, NASA's science directorate got a new leader, a Swiss-American astrophysicist named Thomas Zurbuchen. He was immediately confronted by a number of concerns emanating from the California laboratory. The InSight lander, which had already been delayed from its planned 2016 launch, was at risk of missing a 2018 launch window. JPL also had upcoming deadlines for the Mars 2020 rover and Psyche spacecraft. Additionally, Culberson was pushing the lab to develop a $4 billion orbiter for the Jovian moon Europa.

 

"They were in over their heads," Zurbuchen said.

 

During his first week on the job, Zurbuchen met with two senior leaders at NASA: the agency's administrator, Charles Bolden, and its powerful associate administrator, Robert Lightfoot. Both urged him to kill the helicopter program. Bolden was taking his scientists' advice. Lightfoot also felt that JPL was overwhelmed with work and had no business distracting itself with the experimental helicopter.

 

The NASA leaders were not alone. Zurbuchen encountered two communities that were adamantly opposed to the helicopter. There were the Mars scientists who felt it was not right for a tech demo to take payload space on the rover and consume some of its time at the expense of the mission's real purpose of studying the planet's past habitability. And then there were the Mars 2020 mission managers.

 

"They were against it," Zurbuchen said. "They were just being good managers, by the way. That’s exactly the right answer. You should never distract yourself with things that are not necessary."

 

It would have been easy to axe the helicopter with Elachi gone. It would have been one less distraction for Zurbuchen, who had many fires to put out. He could have done it with a phone call.

“You’re not getting on the rover”

As he settled into his new job, Zurbuchen realized that Lightfoot was right—the Mars 2020 program was running significantly behind schedule to meet its launch date in July 2020. All of its scientific instruments, many of which JPL was assembling, were late. They were going to blow the budget.

 

A critical moment came in early 2017 when Zurbuchen visited JPL. There, he heard two presentations on possible add-ons to Mars 2020. One concerned a "drillable blank," which would essentially allow the mission managers to test whether the rover's drill bits were contaminated. Senior officials at this meeting advised Zurbuchen that this was a "high risk" technology.

 

Van Zyl, Aung, Balaram, and the rest of the helicopter team came next. At the time, they had only begun attempting to fly a small prototype of the helicopter in a chamber that simulated the atmosphere of Mars. As Zurbuchen listened to the presentation, he reflected on the fact that his leadership team at NASA headquarters was opposed to the mission. The rover's managers disliked it. And he wasn't sure the engineers giving the presentation fully understood the technical challenges they were up against.

 

Then the helicopter team made a claim that incensed Zurbuchen. Whereas the drillable blank team had characterized their plans as "high risk," the helicopter team said flying on Mars was "low risk." Zurbuchen's first reaction to this was do they really think I'm this stupid?

 

"You're bullshitting me," Zurbuchen told the helicopter team during the meeting.

 

Seven years later, he still gets a little worked up. "I told them that the first technology was a stone-age type of thing, drilling into the ground, and that was considered high risk," he recalled. "The second one is a drone in a place with a 1 percent pressure atmosphere. This was supposed to be low risk? I basically said, 'You’re not getting on the rover.'”

A way back

Zurbuchen had taken a hard line with the helicopter's team. But as an innovator, he wanted to find a way to get the experimental machine to Mars. As he got to know Aung and van Zyl, they earned his confidence. That "low-risk" assessment of the Mars helicopter? They had made it, basically, because JPL engineers had gotten away with that kind of assessment before, they explained.

 

Not this time. To fly on board Mars 2020, Zurbuchen said the team must overcome two major issues.

 

First, they had to deliver the machine. This meant flying the helicopter to prove it could actually work. And they had to deliver within a budget of $80 million, the amount Culberson had been able to scrounge up in Congress—enough money to support the program but not so much that it would draw attacks from other budget committee members.

 

Secondly, Zurbuchen said, the helicopter could not put the primary mission at risk. If it hitched a ride to Mars, the helicopter would be latched onto the bottom of Perseverance. This raised a potential issue because if the rover landed on a large enough rock, it could get stuck. Based on the Perseverance team's analysis, flying with the helicopter increased the risk. That is, with the helicopter tacked on, a smaller rock could trap the rover.

 

Another issue the rover team worried about was the deployment of the helicopter. What if it failed to detach? Perseverance could not really drive around the red planet with the helicopter slapping around under its belly. Because he didn't believe JPL could deliver on time, Zurbuchen farmed out the development of the deployment mechanism to Lockheed Martin. (The aerospace contractor delivered precisely what was needed on schedule and budget).

 

As he offered Aung and her team a pathway onto the rover, Zurbuchen continued hearing from influential figures in the NASA community that it was too risky. Among those calling was Tom Young, a former director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and a highly respected engineer frequently counted upon to review NASA programs. An experimental tech demo like the helicopter, Young said, had no business flying on the agency's "Class A" missions. By design, such missions called for the maximum amount of risk reduction. These big missions could not fail. To do so would greatly embarrass NASA and threaten future funding.

 

Zurbuchen also conferred with allies like Culberson. He explained to the congressman that if the helicopter could not be safely delivered to Mars, it wasn't going. Culberson agreed that Ingenuity should not fly if it jeopardized the success of Perseverance. "He did not twist my arm," Zurbuchen said.

 

But elsewhere, Culberson was twisting arms.

Overcoming challenges

In a lengthy interview, Zurbuchen said Ingenuity never would have reached Mars but for Culberson's support. The conservative Congressman from Texas was both a devout Christian and a passionate supporter of space exploration. Critically for the Mars helicopter, Culberson's interests extended beyond the parochial politics of the field center in his Houston backyard, Johnson Space Center.

 

He frequently traveled across the country to visit the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, first with Elachi, and later with other directors. During these visits he was referred to as "Chairman" due to his perch on the House Appropriations subcommittee that managed NASA's budget. When Culberson first heard about the helicopter during one of his visits in the early 2010s, he was tickled by its potential and baffled by the opposition of NASA's leaders.

 

"I was thunderstruck when they told me they didn’t want to do it because it was too risky," he said in an interview. "That’s what NASA is for, brilliant engineering. I just wouldn’t let go. I learned over my years of public service to trust my instincts, and I told HQ that although the rovers were magnificent, the one thing that people will remember forever is the first heavier-than-air aircraft flying on Mars."

 

Culberson had the power of the purse. Whereas the White House appointed the leaders of NASA and set policy direction, Congress had to fund those endeavors. Culberson included budget line items for the helicopter even though NASA had not requested the money. And if they resisted? "As Chairman, it's possible to work a little magic," he explained. "I call it standing on their air hose, which helps them focus."

 

Knowing they had the backing of an influential congressman—I joined Culberson on several visits, including one with the Mars helicopter team in 2015, seeing his enthusiasm firsthand for the program—Aung and her team pressed ahead with the technical challenges.

 

 

The first hurdle to overcome was building a light enough vehicle that could fly. The rotors needed to be more than three feet (1 meter) long but stiff enough to rotate thousands of times per minute. The helicopter required a solar panel to collect energy and a stout set of batteries to store it. Then there were the cameras for imaging and navigation, a flight computer, and more.

 

"The biggest thing was mass. It was just such a big battle," Aung said.

 

Eventually, they settled on a top-line mass of 4 pounds (1.8 kg) and fought pitched battles over grams. A change in one area could have big implications downstream. For example, the energy budget called for using about half of the helicopter's power for flying and the other half to keep its batteries warm enough at night, when temperatures sometimes plummeted to -130° Fahrenheit (-90° C). As the team of about 20 people got into testing, however, they realized the thermal power needs were nearly twice what they had allocated. So they had to make difficult trades on the size of the solar array and batteries. But this, in turn, killed their mass margins. In the end, they fought for degrees. How warm, really, did Ingenuity's batteries need to be kept at night?

 

With van Zyl handling the programmatic concerns and keeping the bureaucracy of JPL at bay, Aung's team could focus on these technical problems. The set milestones, such as flight demonstrations, as markers of their progress.

 

"We were obsessed about meeting these milestones because we knew that for every one we didn't make, we could get cut off at that time," she said. "We were such a tight team and so focused on our goals. That's how we survived."

#BREAKING @NASA news!

By the summer of 2017, Thomas Zurbuchen knew a final decision had to be made soon. To assess the helicopter team's technical progress, he asked Bobby Braun, who by then had become dean of the University of Colorado Boulder College of Engineering and Applied Science, to review their work.

 

Originally skeptical of the idea, Braun came away impressed. He reported back to Zurbuchen that the concept had turned into a mature project. Aung's team passed the NASA review with flying colors.

 

Still, the science community and mission managers opposed it. Although Aung's team had satisfied NASA's concerns about the helicopter's risk to the Mars 2020 mission's overall success, there was a new worry. What if the helicopter got to the surface and then had a problem? How much of the rover's time would be consumed troubleshooting issues? How long would Perseverance be anchored to one spot? In a last-ditch effort to kill the helicopter, some scientists took their concerns public.

 

"This comes right out of science time," the project scientist for Mars 2020, Ken Farley, said in early May 2018. "I have personally been opposed to it because we are working very hard for efficiencies, and spending 30 days working on a technology demonstration does not further those goals directly from the science point of view."

 

But Zurbuchen's mind was made up. Ingenuity's team had met the two conditions he laid out a year earlier. Now, it was his turn to act. He realized the best way to win the space community's support would be to get top cover. He went to the relatively new NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, and told him the helicopter announcement would be better if it came from him. As a pilot, Bridenstine loved this kind of derring-do in an exploration mission. He was all in.

 

Accordingly, on May 11, 2018, Bridenstine announced the decision on Twitter. "#BREAKING @NASA news! Our next rover to Mars will carry the first helicopter ever to fly over the surface of another world," he wrote on the social network site. (After leaving as NASA administrator in early 2020, Bridenstine deleted his Twitter account). In an accompanying news release, Bridenstine was effusive. "The idea of a helicopter flying the skies of another planet is thrilling," he said. "The Mars Helicopter holds much promise for our future science, discovery, and exploration missions to Mars."

 

John Culberson was quoted right after Bridenstine.

Flying, finally

Braun moved to JPL in 2020 for a couple of years to run the Planetary Science and Mars programs. Even in the final months before launch, there were calls to pull Ingenuity off the rover because it was considered a distraction. Yet as he watched Aung and her team at work, Braun knew Zurbuchen had made the right decision.

 

"Any time you’re doing something new, and Ingenuity certainly qualifies, there’s always people lined up against it," Braun said. "It's no different from when we worked on Mars Pathfinder in the 1990s. All of the planetary science missions were getting to be big, and the establishment thought the idea of landing on Mars for something like $250 million in then-year dollars was a bit crazy. We were a bunch of kids who didn’t know better. It’s the kids who don’t know any better, and who are led by an experienced, diehard champion who believes—that’s how you make this stuff happen."

 

After a public contest, Ingenuity was named in April 2020 and launched three months later at the height of the pandemic. The Perseverance team had come together under Zurbuchen's dogged leadership to complete the rover and get it buttoned up for an on-time mission. It was a magical moment amid a summer of plague and racial strife.

 

The rover safely landed on Mars in February 2021, and in early April, Ingenuity successfully deployed onto the surface. On April 9, during the first key spin test, the software tripped up. After the team identified a fix, Ingenuity passed this 2,400 rpm test on April 16. Three days later, it flew for the first time. Aung and her team could finally take a deep breath and celebrate.

 

"For so long, I was living in this world where we must get at least one flight," she said. "We owed that to NASA. It felt amazing."

 

And then it kept flying. Again and again. This actually presented a problem. If Ingenuity was going to continue flying, it would require precious time from the rover to monitor its progress, plus relay communications between the helicopter and flight controllers back at JPL.

 

 

Zurbuchen said he gave Jennifer Harris Trosper, who was the Mars 2020 Project Manager at JPL, two options. He was not going to turn off the helicopter. Zurbuchen said the Mars 2020 team could work with the science community to find a way to continue supporting Ingenuity, or they could design a "hero" mission. This would be an arduous flight that would sacrifice the helicopter. Everyone would be a little sad, but it would free Perseverance to go on its merry way.

 

For Trosper and Ken Farley, it was an easy decision. They wanted Ingenuity to fly on as the machine had become a useful scouting tool.

 

Over the course of the next 33 months, Ingenuity survived long winter nights and dust storms, amazing us all by flying 72 missions. During its lifetime, Ingenuity spent a total of 2 hours and 9 minutes soaring through the thin Martian air.

 

Aung would have been happy with 40 seconds.

What it all means

I wrote a feature article in late January on Ingenuity's contributions to spaceflight. To summarize many words with a few: Ingenuity has forever changed how humans think about exploring other worlds by demonstrating flight in an extreme environment. Just as critically, it did so by using commercial, off-the-shelf parts (for mass reasons, primarily) that will be a boon in terms of cost and expediency for future missions. It's among the two or three most significant things NASA has done so far in the 21st century.

 

Based upon the policy struggle to fly Ingenuity, there are lessons to be drawn for NASA managers and policymakers.

 

"I think it is critical to do crazy and innovative things as part of most missions," Zurbuchen said. "It is also critical to do it the right way. You have to make sure a tech demo doesn’t blossom into a disaster and jeopardize the prime mission. But it’s really important that leadership support these kinds of things."

 

Braun agreed that NASA should continue to innovate and try new ideas. It is incumbent on the agency to find opportunities to reinvent the future.

 

"For NASA, there is a really important lesson," he said. "We need to try new things. We need to break out of the status quo ways of doing business because not only is it possible to succeed in different ways, but when we do, there are so many benefits."

 

One striking thing is that almost all of the key people who made this mission happen are gone from their roles. Zurbuchen retired from NASA at the end of 2022 after spending nearly seven years leading the science directorate. Aung left NASA in 2021 to take a project management role at Amazon for its Project Kuiper satellite constellation. Elachi retired in 2016. Culberson lost a reelection bid in 2020. Braun left JPL in 2022 to lead space exploration at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Balaram just retired from NASA. Tragically, van Zyl died of a heart attack in August 2020. He never got to see Ingenuity fly on Mars.

 

So there was just this ephemeral moment in time when the right people, with the right idea, came together to make something truly remarkable happen. And then they went their separate ways. We are incredibly fortunate it happened at all.

 

It's also notable how many people who made Ingenuity fly were not born in the United States. Zurbuchen spent the first three decades of his life in Switzerland before moving to the United States to take a job at the University of Michigan. Elachi was born in Lebanon and did not come to the United States until he sought a graduate degree from the California Institute of Technology. Aung was born in the United States to Burmese parents who were studying abroad at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. However, she soon returned to Burma with them and only came to the United States 15 years later for college. Van Zyl was born in Namibia and Balaram in India.

 

They all found a home in the United States of America—and found the freedom to wander where their imaginations took them.