On Monday, NASA will try to fly a miniature helicopter over the surface of Mars in what would be the first motorized and controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet.
If all goes according to plan, the 1.8 kg helicopter will slowly climb to an altitude of three meters above the Martian surface, pay for 30 seconds, then rotate before landing on a light landing on all four legs. The flight will take place at 3.30am US Eastern Time (8.30am BST / 7.30am GMT). But data confirming the result is not expected to reach NASA until about three hours later.
The test flight will take place 173 million miles from Earth, on the floor of a vast Martian basin called Jezero Crater. Success depends on Ingenuity executing its pre-programmed flight instructions autonomously.
“The moment our team has been waiting for is almost here,” said Ingenuity project manager MiMi Aung. NASA compares the experiment to the feat of the Wright brothers 117 years ago – a small strip of fabric from the original Wright wing is fixed under Ingenuity’s solar panel.
The rotorcraft robot was transported to the red planet in the belly of the rover Perseverance from Mars, which reached the Jezero crater on February 18 after a nearly seven-month journey through space.
NASA hopes to receive images and videos of the flight from the cameras mounted on the helicopter and the Perseverance rover, which will be parked 76 meters away.
If the test succeeds, Ingenuity will perform a few more, longer flights in the coming weeks, although it will have to rest for four to five days between each to recharge its batteries. Prospects for future flights are largely based on a safe, four-point touchdown for the first time.
“It doesn’t have a self-correction system, so if we have a bad landing, that will be the end of the mission,” Aung said. An unexpectedly strong gust of wind is a potential danger that could damage the flight.
NASA hopes that ingenuity – a technological demonstration separate from Perseverance’s main mission to search for traces of ancient microorganisms – paves the way for aerial surveillance of Mars and other destinations in the solar system, such as Venus or the moon of Saturn, Titan.
While Mars has much less gravity than Earth, its atmosphere is only 1% denser, presenting a special challenge for flight. Engineers have equipped the ingenuity with rotor blades that are four feet long and rotate faster than would be needed on Earth for an aircraft of its size. The design has been successfully tested in vacuum chambers built at JPL to simulate Martian conditions, but it remains to be seen whether ingenuity will fly to the red planet.
The small light aircraft has already passed an essential early test, proving that it can withstand nighttime temperatures dropping to -90C, using only solar energy to recharge and keep internal components properly heated.
The planned flight was delayed by a week due to a technical problem during a test rotation of the aircraft’s rotors on April 9. NASA said the issue has been resolved since then.