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

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

The space agency announced on Saturday that it would try to fly the 1.8kg small helicopter early Monday. The first flight is scheduled to take place around 03:30 ET (07:30 UTC). It will take several hours to send data from the helicopter to the Perseverance Rover, and then to a satellite orbiting and back to Earth. NASA therefore expects to receive the first data from Mars back some time after 06:15 ET.

The space agency will start a live stream at that time, sharing photos and responses from scientists and engineers, as people try for the first time to fly a powered vehicle to another world.

NASA originally planned to fly Ingenuity about a week ago, but during a pre-flight, engineers encountered a problem. When the engineers sent an order to the helicopter to test the rotation of its two counter-rotating blades, each 1.2 meters long, the test could not be prevented.

Since then, the mission team, led by project manager MiMi Aung at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has been working on a software solution that involves adding a few commands to the flight series. Since it was a change in software that had been in a stable configuration for about two years, it required extensive testing and validation before being sent to the helicopter.

But the software site seems to have worked, as the helicopter completed a full-speed speed test on Friday, giving the opportunity for a historic flight. For this first flight, Ingenuity will rise a few meters above the ground, soar in the air for about 20 to 30 seconds and then land. The first flight of the Wright Brothers plane, in particular, lasted for 12 seconds.

If this test flight is successful, NASA will become more adventurous in the future and the helicopter will eventually fly up to 300 meters distance at a time.

It’s all experimental, so it’s quite possible Ingenuity will fail. But NASA deserves credit for taking risks to push the frontier of reconnaissance so 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 enigmatic moon’s sand dunes in a decade from now.