After weeks of waiting, NASA on Sunday set a date for the first helicopter in another world to flee and search for strange lives on Mars.
The helicopter Ingenuity unfolded under Perseverance Rover last week, and now NASA is ready to see the helicopter take off – if they get it right, it’s the first human-controlled flight to take place on another planet.
Perseverance landed on Mars in February. Since then, the Mars rover has begun exploring its new home in the Jezero crater, an ancient lake where conditions were ever right for life to flourish under the narrow window in which the Red Planet is a lush and watery world was from years ago. Perseverance Rover is the main law, but Ingenuity’s helicopter flight is the breakout support law that we can not afford to miss.
Here’s all you need to know about Ingenuity’s mission to Mars and how you can watch on Sunday as the helicopter flies above the dust of the Red Planet in search of signs of alien life.
When will the Mars Ingenuity helicopter fly?
An exact flight time is still in the air, a NASA spokesman said Reverse. But at the time of writing, the helicopter is expected to fly to Mars on Sunday, April 11 – if all goes well. (The previous flight date of “not earlier than April 8” has been moved by NASA-JPL, which will probably give more time to prepare for the first flight.)
NASA will hold a live stream on Monday, April 12 at 3:30 a.m. to confirm whether the flight took off and that it was a success. The live stream will likely take place shortly after the first uplift, so viewers of Ingenuity may want to stay up a little later than usual this weekend.
NASA is also holding a press conference Monday morning at 11:00 Eastern. The proximity of this fast approaching date makes everything possible little look of the helicopter on Mars all the more annoying to terrestrial fans.
Given the struggling problem of making a flight to another planet, the conditions should be just as good as for the vessel to fly. It has a coupled payload to make his job a little easier. Unlike the scientific cargo of the rover, the helicopter carries only a camera and some navigation equipment on board. This comes down to Ingenuity’s core mission: it’s primarily a technology demonstration to prove that powered flight can work in other worlds.
In a nod to the history that has brought us this far, the Mars helicopter carries a small piece of dust from the 1903 Wright Brothers’ Flyer on board. In other words, a piece of the first powered flight on Earth will fly again during the first powered flight on another planet, more than a century later.
READ MORE PERSEVERANCE ROVER NEWS FROM REVERSE
How long will Ingenuity fly on Mars?
According to NASA, Ingenuity’s first flight to Mars will probably take only 20-30 seconds. The rig is expected to lift just a few feet off the ground. In essence, NASA’s lofty ambitions are based on the successful execution of these first flights. After taking off for the first time, the Ingenuity team will fly again and again for the next 30 days and undertake more and more ambitious journeys through the Mars heavens.
“After that, the team will try additional experimental flights of increasingly farther and greater altitude,” the agency said in a press release.
“After the helicopter completes its technology demonstration, Perseverance will continue its scientific mission.”
Mars’ atmosphere has about 1 percent the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere. This means that there is no guarantee that Ingenuity will operate its first flight, let alone the subsequent flights. In fact, NASA celebrated the solar helicopter that managed to survive a full night on Mars.
How to watch the Mars helicopter Ingenuity fly:
Unfortunately for Ingenuity fans, there is no live video to watch from the flight, but a recording may be available in the coming days and weeks, thanks to Perseverance’s unique capabilities.
Perseverance has the ability to take videos – the first Mars rover to have this skill. But the rover can send only 2 megabits per second back to earth. At that speed, it means that there will be no live stream available from the first flight of Mars or Ingenuity. The Rover itself operates at 110 watts, so faster transmissions are too power-intensive to perform without endangering the Rover.
In a recent interview, Teddy Tzanetos, leader of Ingenuity’s deputy operations, said data would be available shortly after Ingenuity’s first flight to Mars, including some initial images.
“You can follow with us after we turn off the telemetry and later some images, but it will not be live,” he said in the video interview.
Tzanetos also reveals that the rover will take the helicopter, which means we will be able to see the flight (and hopefully later flights) from various perspectives.
Images of the rover are available on NASA’s website, and any available video of the first flight will eventually be uploaded there as well.
What happens after the Mars helicopter Ingenuity flight?
After the thirty days of test flights, the Perseverance rover will continue its mission in the Jezero crater, looking for signs of past lives on Mars. The NASA press conference on Monday is also likely to provide more details. This will be the end of the ingenuity of the mission.
The Ingenuity team can use data taken from the mission to inform future flights – whether on Mars, the upper layers of the atmosphere Venus, or Saturn’s moon Titan, which has lakes and streams of liquid hydrocarbons over the surface. NASA wants to send a drone there in 2027.