Early Monday, a robotic helicopter that NASA sent to Mars will try to rise a few meters in the air, float and descend. With that simple feat, it would become the first car to fly through the awkward air of the red planet. NASA officials compared it to the Wright Brothers’ 1903 flight to Kitty Hawk, NC. No plane or helicopter has ever been flown to another world.
The Mars helicopter, called the Ingeniousness, traveled from Earth hidden under NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed in February on a mission to look for signs of ancient life near a dry river delta. A few weeks ago, Perseverance escaped ingenuity on a flat Martian plain before flight tests.
The ingenuity is small. Its main body is the size of a spindly four-legged softball sticking out. Above are two sets of blades, each about four feet from tip to tip. They will rotate in opposite directions at about 2,500 revolutions per minute, the fast speed needed to generate enough lift for ingenuity to get off the ground.
When will ingenuity fly and how can I watch it?
On the site of ingenuity on Mars, which is located in an ancient crater called Jezero, will be in the middle of the day, about 12:30 local solar time of Mars. (Time zones on the red planet do not yet have names.)
For humans on Earth, that translates to about 3:30 in the morning, Eastern time, Monday. But no one on Earth will know for hours if the flight was successful or failed or if something happened. Neither ingenuity nor perseverance will come into contact with NASA at that time.
Instead, the two spacecraft will conduct the flight autonomously, executing commands that have been sent to them. Sunday. Later, Perseverance will send the data back to Earth via a spaceship orbiting Mars.
NASA TV will begin broadcasting from the control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory starting at 6:15 a.m. Eastern time as data begins to arrive on Earth. You can watch it on the NASA website.
Additional information will be provided Monday at a press conference at 2:00 p.m., Eastern Time.
What will happen during the test flight?
The first flight will be a modest journey up and down, rising to an altitude of only 10 meters. There, it will land for up to 30 seconds and then land on a landing. Its on-board camera will record images, helping the navigation system maintain the level of the helicopter. On the ground, more than 200 meters away, the Perseverance rooms will also record the flight.
If the test flight succeeds, four more could be tried. The first three are designed to test the basic skills of the helicopter. The third flight could fly a distance of 160 feet and then return.
The last two flights could travel on, but NASA officials did not want to speculate how much.
NASA wants to complete the tests within 30 days of March from the date it gave up ingenuity, so that Perseverance can begin the main part of its $ 2.7 billion mission. He will leave the helicopter behind and head for a delta of the river along the edge of Jezero Crater, where sediments and perhaps chemical evidence of ancient life are preserved.
Ingenuity was an additional $ 85 million project, but not a basic requirement for the success of Perseverance.
Why is it so difficult to fly a helicopter on Mars?
There is not much air to push to generate lift.
At the surface of Mars, the atmosphere is only 1/100 as dense as that of Earth. The lower weight – a third of what you feel here – helps you get in the air. But the takeoff from the surface of Mars is comparable to flying at an altitude of 100,000 feet on Earth. No helicopter on our planet has flown so high and is more than twice the typical flight altitude of jet planes.
Why is NASA flying a helicopter to Mars?
Until 1997, all spacecraft sent to the surface of Mars had been stationary landings. But that year, the Pathfinder mission included something revolutionary for NASA: a robot with wheels. That rover, the Sojourner, was about the size of a short closet, and planetary scientists quickly realized the benefits of being able to move around the Martian landscape. Four other NASA rovers, including Perseverance, have since followed on the red planet.
Ingenuity is essentially Sojourner’s aerial counterpart, a demonstration of a new technology that can be used more in subsequent missions. And proving that the helicopter can fly to Mars can help inform attempts to fly to other worlds in our solar system, such as Titan, Saturn’s moon, where NASA plans to send a quadcopter with nuclear power.