时事热点 专题02 航天航空（2期） --冲刺2022年高考英语阅读理解专项训练（解析版）.doc

时事热点 冲刺2022年高考英语阅读理解（2期） 专题02 航天航空 Passage 1 Some 117 years after the Wright brothers made the first powered flight on Earth,NASA has repeated the accomplishment on another planet. Carried to Mars in the belly of the Perseverance rover, the Ingenuity helicopter lifted off last week from the surface of the Red Planet to an altitude of about 10 feet, hovered for some 30 seconds, turned 96 degrees, and then gently landed. Six days later, on May 3, the drone flew the length of a football field, hitting a top speed of 4.5 mph. That 1 minute 20 second flight was an incredible technical achievement, reports The New York Times. The red planet has significant gravity, about one-third that of the Earth’s. The Martian atmosphere is less than 1 percent as dense as Earth’s, so there is virtually no air for a helicopter’s rotor blades to push against and generate lift. During Martian daytime, the planet’s surface receives only about half the amount of solar energy that reaches the Earth during its daytime, and nighttime temperatures can drop as low as minus 90 degrees Celsius, which can freeze and crack unprotected electrical components. To enable Ingenuity to fly, NASA made the $85 million craft exceptionally light－it weighs 4 pounds－and fitted its body of tissue-box size with two 4-foot-wide carbon-fiber rotor blades. They spin five times faster than those of a conventional helicopter. To survive the freezing Martian nights, it must have enough energy to power internal heaters. Ingenuity will make two more test flights before scientists focus on Perseverance’s primary mission: searching for signs of past microbial life in ancient Martian lake beds. NASA hopes to send more-sophisticated drones to Mars that will be able to carry scientific instruments and reach and study areas inaccessible to wheeled rovers. “What the Ingenuity team has done is to give us the third dimension,” says Michael Watkins, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “They freed us from the surface n