NASA says its Mars helicopter is ready for a historic maiden flight

NASA has problems with it Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars and is ready to fly.

The space agency announced on Saturday that it will attempt to pilot the tiny 1.8kg helicopter early Monday. The maiden flight is scheduled for approximately 3:30 a.m.ET (7:30 UTC). It takes a few hours to transfer the data from the helicopter to the Perseverance rover and then to an orbiting satellite and back to Earth. So NASA expects to receive the first data from Mars sometime after 6:15 a.m. ET.

The space agency will start at that point with a live stream, sharing all the photos and responses from scientists and engineers as humans attempt to pilot a powered vehicle on another world for the first time.

NASA originally planned to fly Ingenuity about a week ago, but during a pre-flight test, engineers ran into a problem. When the engineers sent a command to the helicopter to test the rotation of the two counter-rotating blades, each 1.2 meters long, a problem prevented the test from happening.

Since then, the mission team, led by project manager MiMi Aung of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, worked on a software fix that involved adding a few commands to the flight sequence. Since this was a change to software that had been in a stable configuration for about two years, it had to be extensively tested and validated before being sent to the helicopter.

But the software patch seems to have worked, as the helicopter completed a spin test at full speed on Friday, opening up the opportunity for a historic flight. For this first flight, Ingenuity will rise a few feet above the ground, float in the air for about 20 to 30 seconds, and then land. Notably, the Wright Brothers’ plane’s maiden flight lasted 12 seconds.

If this test flight is successful, NASA will grow bolder in future forays, eventually flying the helicopter up to 300 meters at a time.

This is all experimental, so it is quite possible Ingenuity will fail. But NASA deserves credit for taking risks to push the frontier of exploration a little further. And in an effort to fly to Mars, NASA will gather valuable data for an ambitious mission to Titan, Dragonfly, which will attempt to jump over the moon’s enigmatic sand dunes in a decade.