NASA plans first flight of Mars helicopter Ingenuity on April 8
After conducting numerous checks and double-checks, the Perseverance team has set April 8 as the date on which they hope to attempt the first controlled powered flight on another planet. In about two weeks Ingenuity will make its first hovering flight about 10 feet above the Martian soil.
There are still preparations to be made, however. For starters, the team has to identify an airfield for Perseverance’s landing zone.
Then the helicopter itself must be detached from the belly of the rover, to which it is apparently locked, bolted, and cabled. These are meant to keep it secure during the chaotic landing process and are irreversible so the team has to be 100 percent sure this is the spot and the conditions are right. The process should take about five days.
“Every step we have taken since this journey began six years ago has been uncharted territory in the history of aircraft. And while getting deployed to the surface will be a big challenge, surviving that first night on Mars alone, without the rover protecting it and keeping it powered, will be an even bigger one. Once we cut the cord with Perseverance and drop those final five inches to the surface, we want to have our big friend drive away as quickly as possible so we can get the Sun’s rays on our solar panel and begin recharging our batteries,” Bob Balaram, chief engineer of the project at JPL, said in a NASA news release.
The next few days will involve tests of Ingenuity’s systems and a test spin-up of its rotors to 2,537 RPM. If all the tests and checks are green, then on April 8 at the earliest, Ingenuity will attempt to lift off, going up to 3 meters and staying for 30 seconds. The team should know if the flight was a success within a couple of hours.
An inclusion, on Ingenuity’s chassis, is a tiny scrap of the material from the Wright brothers’ first aircraft, the Flyer; the heartwarming idea that the machine that flew first on Earth will be present in a small way at the first on another planet.
