Dr J (Bob) Balaram: The man behind the Mars helicopter

WASHINGTON: As a kid growing up in southern India in the 1960s, young Balaram was fascinated by rockets and cosmic beauty. When his uncle wrote to the US Consulate, asking for information about Nasa and space exploration, they sent back a bulging envelope stuffed with glossy booklets, entrancing the lad.
His interest in space was piqued further by listening to the Moon landing on the radio."I gobbled it up," he told Nasa's in-house journal many years later. "Long before the internet, the US had good outreach. You had my eyeballs."
On Monday, that passion came to fruition when a small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity launched by Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with Balaram as chief engineer of the mission, made space exploration history when it lifted off and flew over the surface of Mars. It is the first machine from Earth ever to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another planet, the event inviting comparisons to the moment in 1903 when the Wright brothers flew an airplane for the first time on earth.
As with the Wright brothers' biplane, which stayed aloft for only 12 seconds and covered 120 feet on its inaugural flight, Ingenuity's autonomous flight lasted just 30 seconds, hovering in the Martian atmosphere for just 30 seconds before landing softly. But those "30 seconds of terror" - given the complexities of the mission - was the culmination of nearly 35 years of Balaram's work as a robotics technologist at Nasa's JPL, which he joined in 1986 after graduating from New York's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he earned his PhD after a degree in mechanical engineering from IIT Madras, and early education at Rishi Valley School founded by the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti.
Balaram is the second prominent engineer of Indian-origin to feature in Nasa's Mars Mission after Swati Mohan, who is the lead operations engineer of the Mars Rover Perseverance. More than a dozen engineers of Indian-origin are involved in the mission, leading President Biden to make the off-hand remark that Indian-Americans are "taking over" the United States during a conversation with Swati Mohan and other scientists in February.
Balaram's career, according to his JPL biography, has encompassed robotic arms, early Mars rovers, technology for a notional balloon mission to explore Venus and a stint as lead for the Mars Science Laboratory entry, descent and landing simulation software. But it is his physics background that helped him envision flying on Mars.
Balaram compares it to flying on Earth at a 100,000-foot (30,500-meter) altitude - about seven times higher than a typical terrestrial helicopter can fly. The Martian environment presents an aerodynamic challenge; it is also very cold at night. "The atmosphere on Mars primarily made of carbon dioxide is extremely tenuous compared to what we have here on the Earth’s surface. It’s approximately 1 percent of what you would find here on Earth. So, if you stretch your arm out about a meter wide, three feet wide, and thought of a cube about that big, here on Earth that cubic meter of air would be about one kilogram, little over two pounds, but same cubic meter on Mars would be a few tenths of grams, about an ounce. This means any aircraft has to move a lot of air downwards in order to get the reactive force, Newton’s law, to get the lift to send the whole vehicle upwards," he explained in one interview.
Balaram and his team met the challenge by keeping things "gossamer" light - and warm: a 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) helicopter with two pairs of light counter-rotating blades - an upper and lower pair, to slice through the Martian atmosphere. Each pair of blades spans 4 feet (1.2 meters) in diameter.