NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity is less than a week away from the first flight on the Red Planet, and today (April 8) the space agency wants to share the epic achievement with students in a webcast.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will present an ingenuity for children on Thursday at 13:00 EDT (1700 GMT). The live stream will be available here at the start time on the NASA JPL Education YouTube channel.
Today’s talk follows a series of press conferences, webinars and briefings by JPL to inform the public about Ingenuity’s upcoming first flight, which may take off on Sunday (April 11).
Related: Mars Helicopter Ingenuity takes 1st color photo on Red Planet
Join our Mars talk!
Join our forums here to discuss the Perseverance Rover on Mars. What hope do you find?
Students looking for more ways to learn about NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter can embark on a few DIY projects offered by JPL.
How to make a paper helicopter: With this project, students can build their own lightweight helicopter using paper, scissors, pencil, tape measure and ribbon. You can see a NASA video guide here, if necessary, with Spanish captions, on how to build the helicopter.
Encode a Mars Helicopter Game: With this NASA guide, students can create their own video games to explore Mars with a helicopter like Ingenuity. Students learn how to code using Scratch, a visual programming language. You can watch a NASA YouTube video guide about the game here, if necessary with Spanish subtitles.
Video: Watch NASA’s Mars helicopter unfold like a butterfly
The Ingenuity helicopter arrived on Mars last month as part of NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on February 18 in an ancient delta of the Jezero crater. The helicopter is a small, four-limbed drone that weighs only 4 kg. (1.8 kilograms). Its mission is to test flight and reconnaissance technologies that could help future astronauts on Mars.
Perseverance dropped the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars on Saturday (April 3). The solar-powered helicopter successfully survived its first night alone on Mars and will soon test its rotors for the upcoming flight. The camera has already started taking color photos of Mars.
NASA engineers expect Ingenuity to fly a series of ever-increasing flights no higher than 16.5 feet (5 m) above the Martian surface. The Perseverance Rover will stay at a safe distance and take photos of Ingenuity’s test flights while the helicopter takes its own photos from above.
Email Tariq Malik at [email protected] or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us on @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.