The very first powered flights on Mars could only last a few weeks.
The teams behind NASA’s Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter have chosen an airfield on the Red Planet for the 4-pound. (1.8 kilograms) helicopter and are preparing for flights in the near future.
“Ingenuity’s flight tests are not expected to begin until the first week of April,” NASA officials wrote in a mission update on Wednesday (March 17). “The exact timing of the first flight remains fluid as engineers elaborate on the timeline for deployments and vehicle positioning of Perseverance and Ingenuity.”
Related: NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity explained
NASA will provide an update on the Ingenuity flight plan at a press conference next Tuesday (March 23) at 1:30 PM EDT (1730 GMT). You can watch it live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly through the space agency.
Ingenuity is still tucked away in the belly of Perseverance, which landed in the Jezero Crater 28 miles (45 kilometers) off the Red Planet on February 18. After Perseverance reaches the chosen airport, it will deploy Ingenuity on the red dirt and about 100 meters away. The six-wheeled rover will then attempt to document the small helicopter’s flights using its Mastcam-Z camera suite and two microphones, members of the mission team said.
Ingenuity carries a high-resolution camera, but no scientific instruments; it is a technology demonstration designed to pave the way for aerial exploration of Mars on the road. If Ingenuity’s flights are successful, future Red Planet missions could usually include helicopters, which serve as scouts for robbers and / or collect data themselves, NASA officials have said.
After Ingenuity takes off, Perseverance will seriously focus on its core mission. The rover will look for signs of ancient Mars life and collect dozens of samples, which will drag a joint NASA-European Space Agency mission to Earth, perhaps as early as 2031.
Ingenuity isn’t the only technological demonstration that brought perseverance to Mars. One of the rover’s scientific instruments, called MOXIE (“Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment”), is designed to generate pure oxygen from the Red Planet’s thin, carbon dioxide-dominated atmosphere. Such equipment, if scaled up, could help humanity gain a foothold on Mars, NASA officials have said.
Mike Wall is the author of “Outside(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the quest for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.