The Perseverance Rover has been making great strides on the Red Planet since its arrival in February. The latest trip marks NASA launching a helicopter, called Ingenuity, from the surface of Mars – making it the first aircraft ever to be launched from a Martian planet.
Since Perseverance struck down Mars on February 18, it has been slowly making its way across land to find a place of attraction.
The rover has now found a flat “airfield” made up of 33-by-33-foot (10-by-10-meter) flat ground.
NASA has said it will launch Ingenuity on April 8, making it “the first attempt at a powered, aircraft-controlled plane on another planet”.
However, the space agency and its rover have to overcome a number of challenges to launch them, because flying on Mars is a completely different ball game than on Earth.
Gravity on Mars is just one-third the strength of gravity on Earth and atmosphere is just one percent so dense, so ingenuity has to be very light – it weighs just four kilograms.
The helicopter activation process will take a little over six days in total.
On the first day NASA will see the “bolt-breaker” device, which releases the guitar-shaped object from the interior of Stability.
On the second day NASA will see a “cable cutting pyrotechnic device” that allows a mechanical arm that keeps Ingenuity to start turning the helicopter out of position. Two of the four legs of Ingenuity will also be used.
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NASA has said there is no reason to fly except to see if it is possible to fly material from Mars.
MiMi Aung, project manager for the Mars Ingenuity Helicopter, said: “Innovation is an experimental engineering flight test – we want to see if we can fly at Mars.
“There are no scientific instruments on board and no goals for scientific knowledge.
“We are confident that all the engineering data we want to get on both the surface of Mars and aloft can be done within this 30-sol window.”
Innovation will fly in the air for just 30 seconds before sitting down, giving NASA an insight into the feasibility of launching from the surface – data that is extremely useful for the inevitable access of humanity.
NASA said: “Perseverance reduces Ingenuity’s first set of engineering data and, possibly, images and video from the rover’s navigation cameras and Mastcam-Z.
“From the data tied down that first afternoon after the flight, the Mars Helicopter crew expects to be able to determine if their first attempt at flying at Mars was successful.”