NASA will attempt its first creative helicopter flight on Mars on Monday

The US Space Agency (NASA) announced on Saturday that NASA will attempt the first historic flight on Mars of an Ingenuity Mars helicopter next Monday, after it was forced to delay the first attempt due to technical problems.

NASA said in a statement that the scheduled date for that first flight will be from 3:30 a.m. on the eastern coast of the United States (7:30 GMT), indicating that data from the first flight will reach Earth a few hours. Later on, so they will be broadcasting live starting at 6:15 local time (10.15 GMT).

The historic take-off of an Ingenuity Mars helicopter from the Jezero crater on Mars will be the first attempt of a powered flight on another planet.

The original flight date, originally scheduled for April 11, was pushed back, initially, to three days after that, as engineers were working on “pre-flight checks and a solution to the programming problem.”

According to a previous statement, a failure occurred during a high-speed rotation test of the rotors of the small plane, which left Florida (USA) in July 2020 attached to the belly of the persistent rover, which landed on February 18 on the surface of Mars. .

At about 1.8 kg and the size of a soccer ball, Ingenuity has built-in cameras and a microphone to document the journey from your point of view.

Although the flight will be autonomous, the signals the plane will receive come from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

From there they would send general commands about altitude and acceleration, among other things, which are just parameters of creativity to manage its flight.

These signals also go first to the perseverance vehicle, and this car sends it to the helicopter and then repeats the process in the opposite direction, arriving with the response to the ground.

“The perseverance vehicle will provide support during flight operations, image capture, environmental data gathering and housing the base station that allows the helicopter to communicate with mission controllers on the ground,” NASA said Saturday.

The Innovation Journey will pave the way for future missions that include advanced autonomous flying vehicles, collect high-resolution images from the air, and examine hard-to-reach locations for rovers.