NASA says its Mars helicopter is ready for a historic first flight

NASA has solved the problems with Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars and is ready to fly.

The space agency announced on Saturday that it will try to pilot the small 1.8 kg helicopter early Monday. The first flight is scheduled to take place at approximately 3:30 am ET (07:30 UTC). It will take several hours to transmit data from the helicopter to the Perseverance rover, then to a satellite orbiting back to Earth. So NASA anticipates receiving the first data back from Mars sometime after 6:15 AM ET.

The space agency will begin a live stream at that time, sharing any photos and reactions from scientists and engineers as people try to pilot a motor vehicle to another world for the first time.

NASA originally planned to fly Ingenuity about a week ago, but during a pre-flight test, engineers encountered a problem. When engineers sent a command to the helicopter to test the rotation of the two counter-rotating blades, each 1.2 meters long, a problem prevented the test.

Since then, the mission team, led by project manager MiMi Aung of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has been working on a software solution that involved adding a few commands to the flight sequence. Because this was a software change that was in a stable configuration for about two years, it required extensive testing and validation before being sent to the helicopter.

But the software patch seems to have worked, as the helicopter completed a top-speed rotation test on Friday, offering the possibility of a historic flight. For this first flight, Ingenuity it will rise a few meters above the ground, place in the air for about 20 to 30 seconds and then land. In particular, the first flight of the Wright brothers’ plane lasted 12 seconds.

If this test flight is successful, NASA will become bolder in future incursions, eventually flying by helicopter over a distance of up to 300 meters at a time.

Everything is experimental, so it is very possible Ingenuity will fail. But NASA deserves credit for taking the risk to push the frontier of exploration further. And trying to fly to Mars, NASA will gather valuable data for an ambitious mission to Titan, Dragonfly, which will try to cross the enigmatic sand dunes of the moon over a decade from now.