The big day is almost here for the team behind NASA Helicopter Mars Ingeniousness, who spent six years developing the first plane to fly on the Red Planet.
On Monday (April 19), the ultra-light robot will try to take off in the Martian sky and, if successful, this maneuver will be the first controlled and controlled flight from another planet. Ingenuity is scheduled to take off on Monday at 03:30 EDT (0730 GMT), but its flight controllers are cautious.
If the ingenuity moves away from the Martian terrain, NASA will transmit a live stream of the first test flight data as it reaches the Ingenuity mission team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. This live stream begins at 6:15 AM EDT (1015 AM PDT) Monday. You can watch that webcast here and on the Space.com homepage, as well as directly from NASA TV.
Related: How to watch the first online flight of Ingenuity’s Mars helicopter
“Our team sees Monday’s first attempt as a rocket launch: we’re doing everything we can to make it a success, but we also know we’ll have to wash and try again,” said MiMi Aung, manager. Ingenuity project at JPL, wrote in a NASA blog post on Saturday (April 17th). “In engineering, there is always uncertainty, but that makes working on advanced technology so interesting and rewarding.”
Monday’s flight will mark the second time NASA is ready to fly ingeniously to Mars. The first flight attempt of the Mars helicopter on April 11 was delayed by a timing error in its systems, which was addressed to the mission engineers.
The first flight of ingenuity to Mars is approaching
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The $ 85 million ingenuity will try to rise from the ground around noon Time on Mars when NASA says the winds in the area are expected to be at its lightest. The ingenuity will begin to rise to a height of about 3 meters. It will move for about 20 seconds, then descend by about 3 feet per second (1 m / s) until it lands back on Crater Lake.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover will act as a communications intermediary between the helicopter, the spacecraft orbiting flight assistance and mission control. The rover will also be an active observer, taking photos and videos of this first flight at a distance of 100 meters from Ingenuity airfield.
Today, the downlink team will watch closely as the information is transmitted from the rover via NASA Mars’ reconnaissance orbiter (MRO) back on Earth, Tim Canham declared ingenuity operations at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at a news conference on April 9 before the first flight attempt.
Related: Follow the ingenuity of NASA’s Mars helicopter by testing its blades! (video)
The first thing they will do is check that they have obtained the data correctly, and then the information is searched to prove that the ingenuity has climbed, glided and landed. They will confirm these findings with altimetric data and then find out with certainty whether or not the flight took place.
On Monday, the team will also take a look at the black-and-white navigation photos taken by the 0.5-megapixel camera facing down at the bottom of the Ingenuity fuselage, according to Canham. Other images, such as color views from Perseverance, are likely to be disconnected later. The ingenuity is also equipped with a 13-megapixel single-color field camera facing the horizon, but it is not yet clear when they will be available to the public.
Related: These selfies of NASA’s Mars helicopter with Perseverance are just amazing
Preparations and challenges
“It simply came to our notice then The ingenuity was perfectly abandoned of the Perseverance to the Surface rover, “Aung told a news conference on April 9th.
Aung added that the energy profile of the helicopter, the thermal models and the operating speed of the rotor look very good and that its sensors have been turned on. Everything is ready for a potentially historic operation. “We will test, prove and learn no matter the outcome of this first attempt,” Aung said.
This approach proved useful when the ingenuity suffered an error with the “watchdog” timer during the last tests for the first flight attempt on April 11th. The problem forced NASA to withdraw from the flight test, while engineers came up with a software solution. In fact, they came with two.
“If our initial approach to flight doesn’t work, the rover will send the new flight control software to the helicopter,” Aung wrote on Saturday. “We will then need a few extra days of training to load and test the new software on ingenuity, to redo the rotor tests in this new configuration, and to recycle for a first flight attempt.”
Flying to Mars is not a simple feat. The atmosphere of the Red Planet is very different from that which covers the Earth.
“It’s very difficult to fly to Mars,” Amelia Quon, JPL’s ingenious camera test engineer, told a news conference on April 9. “The main reason is that the atmosphere is very, very thin. It’s about a percentage of the density of the atmosphere at [Earth’s] sea level. This is the equivalent of about 100,000 meters altitude on Earth, or three times the height of Mount Everest. In general, we don’t fly things that high. Commercial aircraft fly at about 35,000 feet; Earth’s record for helicopter altitude at about 41,000 feet … Mars has a thinner atmosphere than Earth, but that’s not really enough to counteract the effects of that thin atmosphere. “
The first flight of ingenuity is a short and simple technical demonstration, with many implications. If it flies, the helicopter would prove that engineers can successfully build spaceships to fly in the atmospheric conditions of an alien world they have never experienced. The demonstration would also show that it is possible to order a vehicle to fly from a control center based on a completely different planet. It could also be the first in a long line flying interplanetary successors, also.
Visit Space.com Monday for a full coverage of the first flight of the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Helicopter on the Red Planet.
Follow Doris Elin Urrutia on Twitter @salazar_elin. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.