NASA’s ingenious helicopter is scheduled to try its first motor flight over another world at 3:30 AM ET Monday. The two-bladed rotor plane will attempt to climb 10 feet above the ground and move into position for 30 seconds, while cameras on NASA’s Perseverance rover record the historic test from a distance.
The four-kilogram ingenious Copter landed on Mars on February 18, attached to the womb of Perseverance, NASA’s latest rover on Mars, whose main mission is to look for signs of ancient Martian life. Perseverance took the time to witness the flight of ingenuity and report the results to Earth. Monday’s ingenuity flight test is the first of five planned in a 31-day window that began last week. If all goes well, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California will begin planning the next four, which could see the ship climb higher and travel further, depending on the results of its first test.
JPL engineers tried to set expectations for the test flight during recent press conferences: “It’s very difficult,” said Elsa Jensen, chief operating officer for one of the cameras aboard the Perseverance, which will be set on ingenuity. The tests went well in the last week, Jansen added. “But we know there will be surprises.”
How to look
If the flight takes off as planned on Monday, NASA will have live broadcasts starting around 06:15 ET, Monday hosted on YouTube, its website, Twitter, Facebook and Twitch.
Due to the long delay of the data between Mars and Earth, we will not see live videos about the flight attempt – it will probably take a few days to get these images. Instead, NASA’s delivery flows will show engineers who are gradually analyzing data from Mars, which will confirm whether or not the ingenuity has survived its test. Did it fly as expected or was it swept away by a gust of wind? Did an alien steal it? We will know immediately what the engineers will find out.
Log in early Monday to see how the historic flight is going.
What’s next
The power supply of ingenuity will be exhausted on landing, so it must transmit the data to Perseverance in the most efficient way possible. This download of landing data will include some low-resolution black-and-white images captured by the navigation camera pointing down below its body the size of a tissue box.
On Monday, engineers will receive other images captured by two cameras on Perseverance – Navcam and Mastcam-Z – with much higher resolution.
The images from Ingeniousness, along with a wealth of summary data, will transmit signals to the so-called Mars base station on the body of Perseverance, which will transmit those signals to a satellite orbiting Mars, which will then pull the data through the deep space network GODMOTHER. all the way back to Earth. The ingenuity will go into sleep mode and recharge its batteries for the rest of the day using the small cutting solar panel above its small rotor wings.
The next day on Mars, or Earth, the engineers will wake up Ingenuity again and take the first 13 megapixel color images taken by the other camera facing the horizon. More flight data will be sent over the next day – “this is a kind of reward for this project,” said Tim Canham, head of operations at Ingenuity.
“This is definitely a high-risk, high-reward experiment,” MiMi Aung, Ingenuity project manager at NASA JPL, said at a news conference on Friday. Based on several hours of Martian weather tests, simulations and analyzes, Aung said that “confidence is high” among the team of engineers.
The four-legged carbon fiber blades, long of ingenuity, were successfully unlocked last week, after planting their feet on the surface, and the engineers managed to perform a short centrifugation test at 50 rpm. For the actual flight of the spacecraft, those blades will rotate up to 2,400 rpm – fast enough to reach rise in the ultra-thin atmosphere of Mars.
The ingenuity of his first flight test will determine the parameters of his future flight tests. Aung said that “the life of the helicopter will be determined by how well it lands,” suggesting that engineers could conduct several flight tests within 31 days if things were to succeed. However, after that window, ingenuity will probably recede.