Early Monday, a robotic helicopter sent by NASA to Mars will attempt to rise a meter in the air, hover, and descend again. With that simple feat, it would become the first machine to fly through the wispy skies of the red planet. NASA officials have compared it to the 1903 Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk, NC. Never before has such a thing as an airplane or a helicopter taken off to another world.
The Mars helicopter, dubbed Ingenuity, traveled from Earth tucked under NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on the mission in February to look for signs of ancient life near a dried-up river delta. A few weeks ago, Perseverance dropped Ingenuity on a flat Mars plain prior to the flight tests.
Ingenuity is small. The main body is about the size of a softball with four spindly legs protruding. On top are two sets of knives, each about four feet from tip to tip. They will spin in opposite directions at about 2,500 revolutions per minute, the fast speeds needed to generate enough lift for Ingenuity to get off the ground.
When does Ingenuity fly and how can I watch it?
At the Ingenuity site on Mars, which is in an old crater called Jezero, it will be noon, around 12:30 p.m. local solar time on Mars. (The time zones on the red planet don’t have names yet.)
For people on Earth, that means about 3:30 Eastern time on Monday. But no one on Earth will know for hours whether the flight was successful or failed, or if anything happened at all. Neither Ingenuity nor Perseverance will come into contact with NASA at that point.
Instead, the two spacecraft will run the flight autonomously and execute commands sent to them on SundayLater, Perseverance will return data to Earth via a spacecraft orbiting Mars.
NASA TV will begin broadcasting from the control room of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory starting at 6:15 a.m. Eastern Time when the data arrives on Earth. You can check it out on NASA’s website.
Additional information will be provided at a press conference Monday at 2:00 PM Eastern Time.
What happens during the test flight?
The first flight should be a modest up-and-down journey, rising to a height of just 10 feet. There it will float for up to 30 seconds and then descend to a landing. The built-in camera records images, allowing the navigation system to maintain the level of the helicopter. On the ground, more than 60 meters away, the Perseverance’s cameras will also record the flight.
If the test flight is successful, up to four more can be attempted. The first three are designed to test the basic skills of the helicopter. The third flight could fly a distance of 50 meters and then return.
The last two flights could travel farther, but NASA officials didn’t want to speculate how much.
NASA plans to complete the tests within 30 Martian days of Ingenuity being dropped so Perseverance can begin most of its $ 2.7 billion mission. It will leave the helicopter and head towards a river delta along the rim of the Jezero crater where sediments and perhaps chemical hints of ancient life have been preserved.
Ingenuity was a fun, additional $ 85 million project, but not a core requirement for Perseverance’s success.
Why is it so difficult to fly a helicopter on Mars?
There is not much air to push to generate lift.
On the surface of Mars, the atmosphere is only 1/100 the density of the Earth. The lesser gravity – a third of what you feel here – helps with getting into the air. But taking off from the surface of Mars is comparable to flying at an altitude of 30,000 feet on Earth. No helicopter on our planet has flown this high, and it is more than twice the typical flight altitude of jetliners.
Why does NASA fly a helicopter on Mars?
Until 1997, all spacecraft sent to the surface of Mars were stationary landers. But that year, the Pathfinder mission included something revolutionary for NASA: a robot on wheels. That rover, Sojourner, was about the size of a short filing cabinet, and planetary scientists soon realized the benefits of being able to move through the Martian landscape. Four other NASA rovers, including Perseverance, have since been tracked to the red planet.
Ingenuity is essentially the counterpart of Sojourner in the sky, a demonstration of a new technology that can be used more extensively on later missions. And by showing that the helicopter can fly on Mars, it could help inform flight attempts on other worlds in our solar system, such as Titan, Saturn’s moon where NASA plans to send a nuclear-powered quadcopter.