Nasa will on Monday attempt to fly a miniature helicopter above the surface of Mars in the first powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet.
If all goes according to plan, the 1.8 kg helicopter will slowly take off to a height of three meters above the surface of Mars, soar for 30 seconds and then turn before landing after a soft landing on all four legs. The flight must take place at 03:30 US Eastern Daylight (8.30am BST / 7.30am GMT). Data confirming the outcome will not reach Nasa until about three hours later.
The test flight will take place 173 million miles from Earth on the floor of a vast Mars basin called the Jezero Crater. Success depends on Ingenuity executing its pre-programmed flight instructions autonomously.
“The moment our team has been waiting for is almost here,” said Ingenuity project manager MiMi Aung. Nasa compares the experiment to the performance of the Wright Brothers 117 years ago – a small wings wing cloth from the original Wright flyer was placed under Ingenuity’s solar panel.
The robotic rotor craft was transported to the red planet in the belly of Nasa’s Mars Rover Perseverance, which crashed into Jezero Crater on February 18 after a nearly seven-month journey through space.
Nasa hopes to receive images and videos of the flight from cameras mounted on the helicopter and on the Perseverance Rover, which will be parked 76 meters away.
If the test passes, Ingenuity will undertake several additional, longer flights in the coming weeks, though it will have to rest between four and five days between each to recharge its batteries. Prospects for future flights for the first time are largely based on a safe four-point touch.
“It does not have a system of self-correction, so if we land badly, it will be the end of the mission,” Aung said. An unexpectedly strong windstorm is a potential danger that could spoil the flight.
Nasa hopes that Ingenuity – a technology demonstration separate from Perseverance’s primary mission to search for traces of ancient microorganisms – paves the way for air surveillance of Mars and other destinations in the solar system, such as Venus or Saturn’s moon Titan.
While Mars has much less gravity than Earth, its atmosphere is only 1% as dense, which presents a special challenge for flight. Engineers equipped Ingenuity with rotor blades that were four feet long and rotated faster than would be needed on Earth for an aircraft of its size. The design has been successfully tested in vacuum chambers built at JPL to simulate Martian conditions, but it remains to be seen whether Ingenuity will fly on the red planet.
The small, lightweight aircraft has already passed an early important test by showing that it can withstand a low temperature of -90 ° C and can only use solar power to properly heat the internal components.
The planned flight was delayed for a week with a technical fault during a test run of the plane’s rotors on 9 April. Nasa said the case has since been resolved.