NASA will try to make the first historic flight to Mars of its Ingenuity Mars helicopter next Monday, after having to postpone the first attempt due to technical problems, the American space agency announced on Saturday.
The scheduled time for that first flight would be 3:30 a.m. on the east coast of the United States (7:30 GMT), NASA said in a statement, indicating that the dates of the first flight will reach Earth. hours later, so they will broadcast live from 6:15 local time (10.15 GMT).
The historic take-off of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter from Jezero crater on Mars would mark the first attempt at a motor flight to another planet.
The original flight date, originally scheduled for April 11, was initially rejected three days later because engineers were working on “pre-flight checks and a solution to a scripting problem.”
According to an earlier statement, a failure occurred during a high-speed test of the rotors of the small aircraft, which left Florida (USA) in July 2020, attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover, which landed on February 18 last year. on Mars.
At about 1.8 kilograms and the size of a soccer ball, Ingenuity has built-in cameras and a microphone to document the flight from your perspective.
Although the flight will be autonomous, the signals that the aircraft will receive come from JPL in California.
From there they will send general commands about elevation and acceleration, among others, which are just parameters for Ingeniousness to manage its own flight.
These signals go first to the Perseverance rover, and this vehicle sends them to the helicopter and then repeats the operation in reverse to reach Earth in response.
“The Perseverance Rover will provide support during flight operations, take images, collect environmental data and house the base station that allows the helicopter to communicate with mission controllers on Earth,” NASA explained on Saturday.
The flight of ingenuity would pave the way for future missions that will include advanced robotic vehicles, collect high-resolution images from the air and examine hard-to-reach sites for rovers.