The big day is almost here for the team behind NASA’s Mars helicopter Vernuf, who spent six years developing the first aircraft to fly on the Red Planet.
On Monday (April 19), the ultra-lightweight robot will attempt to take to the skies and if it succeeds, this maneuver will be the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. Ingenuity is expected to take off at 03:30 EDT (0730 GMT) on Monday, but its flight controllers are cautious.
If Ingenuity retrieves it from Mars, NASA will broadcast a live stream of the first test flight data as it reaches Ingenuity’s mission team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. This live stream starts Monday at 06:15 EDT (1015 PDT). You can watch the webcast here and on the Space.com homepage, as well as directly from NASA TV.
Related: How to watch the first flight of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity online
“Our team views Monday’s first flight as a rocket launch: we’re doing everything in our power to make it a success, but we also know we may have to scrub and try again,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity Project Manager. at JPL, said. , wrote in a NASA blog post on Saturday (April 17). “In engineering, there is always uncertainty, but that’s what makes working on advanced technology so exciting and rewarding.”
Monday’s flight is the second time NASA is ready to fly Ingenuity to Mars. The first flight attempt of the Mars helicopter on April 11 was delayed by a timing in its systems, which addressed mission engineers.
Ingenuity’s first Mars flight approaching
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The $ 85 million Ingenuity will try to get the afternoon off the ground March time when NASA says that the wind in the area is expected to be at its lightest. Ingenuity will begin to rise to a height of about 10 feet (3 meters). It will soar for about 20 seconds and then descend at about 3 feet per second (1 m / s) until it rises again. Jezero Crater.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover will act as the communications intermediary between the helicopter, revolving around spacecraft that aids flight and mission control. The rover will also be an active observer by taking photos and videos of this first flight at a distance of 330 meters (100 meters) from Ingenuity’s airport.
Today, the downlink team will closely monitor the information transmitted by NASA through the rover Mars Exploration Orbiter (MRO) back to Earth, said Tim Canham, the inventive operations at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), during a press conference on April 9 before 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 have the data correctly, and then look at the information for evidence that Ingenuity ascended, hovered and landed. They will confirm these findings with altitude data to then check whether the flight took place or not.
The team will also look at black-and-white navigation photos on Monday, which Canham said were aimed at the bottom of the Ingenuity hull, according to the 0.5-megapixel camera. Other images, such as the color views of Perseverance, are likely to be turned off later. Ingenuity has also been equipped with a single-color 13-megapixel horizon camera, but it is not yet clear when the public will be available.
Related: These selfies of NASA’s Mars helicopter with perseverance are just amazing
Preparations and challenges
‘Until now, we’ve been talking to Ingenuity every day since Ingenuity is perfectly dropped by the Perseverance rover to the surface, ‘Aung said at the April 9 press conference.
Aung added that the energy profile, the thermal models and the working speed of the rotor all look good and that its sensors are turned on. Everyone is ready to embark on a potentially historic operation. “We will test, prove and learn regardless of the outcome in this first attempt,” Aung said.
The approach came in handy when Ingenuity had a problem with a “watchdog” timer during the final tests for its first flight attempt on April 11th. The issue forced NASA to abandon the flight attempt while engineers devised a software solution. In fact, they came up with two.
“If our initial approach to flight does not work, the rover will send the new flight control software to the helicopter,” Aung wrote on Saturday. “We then need a few more days of preparation to load and test the new software on Ingenuity, repeat the rotor tests in this new configuration and retrieve for a first flight attempt.”
Flying on Mars is no easy task. The atmosphere of the Red Planet is very different from that of Earth.
“It’s very difficult to fly on Mars,” Amelia Quon, engineering chamber test engineer at JPL, explained during the April 9 press conference. “The main reason is that the atmosphere is very, very thin. It’s about one percent of the density of the atmosphere. [Earth’s] sea level. It is equivalent to about 100,000 feet high on Earth, or three times the height of Mount Everest. We usually do not fly things that high. Commercial aircraft fly about 35,000 feet; the 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 first flight is a short and simple technological demonstration with many implications. As it flies, the helicopter will demonstrate that engineers can successfully build spacecraft to fly under the atmospheric conditions of an alien world they have never experienced firsthand. The demonstration also shows that it is possible to command a vehicle to fly from a control center based on a completely different planet. It can also be the first in a long line flying interplanetary successors, too.
Visit Space.com Monday for full coverage of the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity’s first flight on the Red Planet.
Follow Doris Elin Urrutia on Twitter @salazar_elin. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.