If all goes well, the Ingenuity helicopter will fly on Mars this weekend. This historic first controlled flight on another planet will take place on Sunday at about 10:54 p.m. Eastern time.
The following written content from Ashley Strickland
Unlike when the helicopter’s fellow traveler, the Perseverance rover, landed on Mars on February 18, we won’t be able to see images or know if it was successful right away.
The helicopter team will be in mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, early Monday morning to receive and analyze the first data from Ingenuity’s flight attempt.
Live coverage will be available on NASA’s site Monday morning beginning at 3:30 a.m. ET, with the first data expected to arrive around 4:15 a.m. ET.
The Ingenuity helicopter has unlocked and spun its blades in preparation for flight.
Ingenuity, which is a technology demonstration, will fly for about 40 seconds total on Sunday. The 4-pound helicopter will spin up its two 4-foot blades, rise up 10 feet (3 meters) in the air, hover, make a turn, take a photo and touch back down on Mars.
If this first flight is successful, Ingenuity could fly up to four more times this month.
The little helicopter has checked off multiple milestones so far, like wiggling its blades and surviving the freezing cold nights on Mars.
Now, it needs to autonomously fly through the thin Martian atmosphere, with no help from its teams on Earth. Radio signals take 15 minutes and 27 seconds to cross the current gap between Earth and Mars, which spans 173 million miles (278.4 million kilometers).
“Mars is hard not only when you land, but when you try to take off from it and fly around, too,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity project manager at JPL, in a statement. “It has significantly less gravity, but less than 1% the pressure of our atmosphere at its surface. Put those things together, and you have a vehicle that demands every input be right.”
Capturing first flight
The Perseverance rover, which helps the helicopter and its mission team on Earth communicate with each other, will receive the flight instructions from JPL on Sunday. The rover will then send those plans on to the helicopter. Perseverance will be parked at an overlook 215 feet (65 meters) away from the helicopter so it can safely watch the flight and capture images and videos.
After some initial tests of the blades before flight, Ingenuity will spin up the rotors and conduct its flight. The preflight tests will allow the helicopter configure the pitch of the blades to help it lift up.
“It should take us about six seconds to climb to our maximum height for this first flight,” said Håvard Grip, flight control lead for Ingenuity at JPL, in a statement. “When we hit 10 feet, Ingenuity will go into a hover that should last — if all goes well — for about 30 seconds.
“During this hover, the helicopter will capture images 30 times per second to feed into the navigation computer, making sure Ingenuity remains level and in the middle of its 33-by-33-feet (10-by-10-meter) air field. Read more from CNN
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