Nasa’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter set for first flight

Nasa is set to make history as it attempts to launch a helicopter from the surface of Mars.

If successful, it would be the first powered, controlled flight on another planet.

The demonstration should see the Mars-copter – called Ingenuity – rise to about 3m, hover for roughly 30 seconds, swivel and then land.

But with never-tried-before technology and challenging flying conditions, the flight will be difficult to pull off.

“It feels absolutely nuts,” says Farah Alibay, a systems engineer at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

“We’ve been 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.”

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.

Where will the flight take place?

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.

Engineers say the helicopter looks in good shape for its test flight. A software patch to take care of a technical glitch was installed and tested in recent days, but everything should now be ready for the big moment.

A full-speed rotor run-up was performed on Friday.

“We have fully confirmed that Ingenuity has enough energy and power to perform this flight at Mars,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity project manager, at a pre-flight press briefing.

If the flight works, a further four flights will be attempted over the coming days, each one taking the helicopter further afield.

Agencies