NASA will try to fly Ingenuity for the first time early next month. The agency announced it plans to test the 4-pound prototype helicopter no earlier than April 8. Ingenuity attached its way to Mars to the belly of NASA’s Perseverance Rover, which successfully landed on the surface of the Red Planet on 18 February.
Perseverance will harness ingenuity in a 33 by 33-foot piece of land in the Jezero crater that NASA has chosen for its flatness. It will take about six days to complete the entire process, with one step of the procedure involving a pyrotechnic cable cutter. After unloading Ingenuity, it will carefully withdraw from the helicopter to allow its solar cells to recharge. Once deployed, NASA will attempt to complete the entire test flight process within approximately 31 days. “As with everything with the helicopter, this kind of deployment has never been done before,” said Farah Alibay, a systems engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
If all goes according to plan, Ingenuity’s first test flight will soar 30 seconds off the surface of the planet. So far, NASA has only had the chance to fly Ingenuity here on Earth, where it has been tested in vacuum chambers and laboratories. Making a vehicle fly over Mars presents some unique challenges. Although there is less gravity on the planet, the atmosphere is also significantly less dense. But perhaps the biggest challenge for the robot is the cold temperature of Mars. The night temperatures can drop to minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit. “Mars is difficult,” said MiMi Aung, project manager for Ingenuity at JPL. “Our plan is to work what the Red Planet indicates to us, just as we have dealt with every challenge over the past six years – along with stubbornness and a lot of hard work and a little ingenuity.”