Nasa tests Ingenuity helicopter's first flight to Mars
Ingenuity is a 1.8kg (4lb) helicopter that traveled to Mars inside Nasa's Perseverance rover, which landed in February 2021. This small helicopter is the first to fly on another planet. Nasa says it's now aiming to test it on Monday 19 April but admits it may not be successful, in which case they'll try again later in the week.
Ingenuity is scheduled for lift-off at 07:30 GMT (08:30 BST) on Monday. The first data revealing whether the chopper experiment worked should start arriving back at Earth some three hours later. This information has to be relayed through Nasa's Perseverance rover and a satellite at Mars that will beam it to JPL.
Flying on the Red Planet isn't straightforward, Nasa systems engineer Farah Alibay explains. It feels absolutely nuts,” says Farah Alibay, a systems engineer at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)."We've be6en flying on Earth for just over 100 years, and now we're like, 'yeah, we're gonna go to another planet and fly'. It's crazy. But that's the beauty of exploration. That's the beauty of engineering.”
The Perseverance Rover landed in a region of the Red Planet called Jezero Crater. The robot carried the helicopter beneath it as it made the perilous descent to Mars' surface in February. Perseverance then drove to an "airstrip" about 20m away from its landing site, lowering Ingenuity to the ground and taking a selfie of the two of them.
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