The big day is almost upon us for the team behind NASA’s Mars Helicopter Ingenuity, who spent six years developing the first aircraft to fly on the Red Planet.
On Monday (April 19), the ultra-light robot will attempt to take off into the skies of Mars and, if successful, this maneuver will become the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. Ingenuity is scheduled to take off Monday at 3:30 am EDT (7:30 am GMT), but flight controllers are on the alert.
If Ingenuity pulls it off Martian ground, NASA will broadcast a live stream of the first test flight data when it reaches Ingenuity’s mission team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. That live stream starts Monday at 6:15 am EDT (10:15 am PDT). You can watch that webcast here and on the Space.com homepage, and also directly from NASA TV.
Related: How to watch the first flight of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity online
“Our team sees Monday’s first flight as a rocket launch: we’re doing everything we can to make it a success, but we also know we might have to scrub and try again,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity project manager at JPL. , wrote Saturday (April 17) in a NASA blog post. “There is always uncertainty in engineering, but this is what makes working on advanced technology so exciting and rewarding.”
Monday’s flight marks the second time NASA is ready to fly Ingenuity to Mars. The Mars helicopter’s first flight attempt on April 11 was delayed by a timing malfunction in its systems, which has been addressed by mission engineers.
Ingenuity’s first Mars flight is approaching
Join our Mars talk!
Join our forums here to discuss the Perseverance rover on Mars. What do you hope will be found?
The $ 85 million ingenuity will try to take off around noon Mars time when NASA says the wind in the area is expected to be lightest. Ingenuity begins to soar to heights of about 10 feet (3 meters). It floats for about 20 seconds and then descends at about 3 feet per second (1 m / s) until it lands on Crater lake
NASA’s Perseverance rover will act as the communications intermediary between the helicopter, the orbiting spacecraft supporting the flight, and mission control. The rover will also be an active observer by capturing photos and video of this maiden flight at a distance of 100 meters from Ingenuity airport.
Today, the downlink team will keep a close eye as the information is relayed from the rover through NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) back to Earth, Tim Canham, chief of Ingenuity operations at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said at a press conference April 9 ahead of the first flight attempt.
Related: Watch NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity test its blades! (video)
The first thing they will do is verify that they received the data correctly, and then the information will be searched for evidence that Ingenuity ascended, hovered, and landed. They will confirm these findings with altimeter data to then be sure that the flight has taken place.
On Monday, the team will also get a look at black-and-white navigation photos taken with the 0.5-megapixel down-facing camera on the underside of the Ingenuity’s hull. Other images, such as the color renditions resulting from Perseverance, are likely to be downlinked later. Ingenuity is also equipped with a single-color 13-megapixel horizon-focused all-terrain camera, but it is not yet clear when those will be available to the public.
Related: These persistence selfies from NASA’s Mars helicopter are just amazing
Preparations and challenges
“We have spoken to Ingenuity every day since then Ingenuity was dropped perfectly by the Perseverance rover to the surface, ”Aung said at the April 9 press conference.
Aung added that the rotor’s energy profile, thermal models, and operating speeds all look great, and the sensors are turned on. Everything is ready for a potentially historic operation. “We will test, prove and learn regardless of the outcome of this first attempt,” Aung said.
That approach proved useful when Ingenuity was malfunctioning with a “watchdog” timer during final tests for its maiden flight attempt on April 11. The problem forced NASA to abandon the escape attempt while engineers devised a software fix. In fact, they came up with two.
“If our initial approach to the flight doesn’t work, the rover will send the new flight control software to the helicopter,” Aung wrote Saturday. “We would then need a few extra days of preparation to load and test the new software on Ingenuity, rerun the rotor tests in this new configuration, and recycle for a first flight attempt.”
Flying on Mars is not easy. The Red Planet’s atmosphere is very different from Earth’s.
“It’s very difficult to fly on Mars,” explained Amelia Quon, Ingenuity Chamber Test Engineer at JPL, at the April 9 press conference. “The main reason is that the atmosphere is very, very thin. It’s about one percent of the atmosphere’s density [Earth’s] sea level. That’s the equivalent of about 30,000 feet on Earth, or three times the height of Mount Everest. We generally don’t fly that high. Commercial aircraft fly at approximately 35,000 feet; Earth’s record for helicopter altitude at about 41,000 feet … Mars has a thinner atmosphere than Earth, but that’s not really enough to counteract the effects of that thin atmosphere. “
Ingenuity’s maiden flight is a short and simple technical demonstration with many implications. When it flies, the helicopter would demonstrate that engineers can successfully build spacecraft to fly under the atmospheric conditions of an alien world they have never experienced firsthand. The demonstration would also show that it is possible to fly a vehicle from a control center based on an entirely different planet. This could also be the first in a long series of flying interplanetary successorsalso.
Visit Space.com Monday for full coverage of the first flight of the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity on the Red Planet.
Follow Doris Elin Urrutia on Twitter @salazar_elin. follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.