NASA's Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance rover click their 'first selfie' on Mars

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) first helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity and robotic explorer Perseverance just took their ‘first selfie’ from Jezero Crater. The image was posted by the official Twitter account of NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover on April 8 as Ingenuity readies for its first flight scheduled this week. 

Ingenuity made its touch down on the surface of the Red Planet after being dropped from its mother ship, the Perseverance rover. Sharing the image of Ingenuity officially on Martian soil, NASA announced on April 4 that the helicopter’s first flight is just over a week away, that is, on April 11. Officials with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California wrote in a Twitter announcement that Mars helicopter landed with a final drop of 4 inches from Perseverance. 

Ingenuity is expected to make its first flight on April 11 and the data from the test will be reaching March the next day, April 12. The $85 million drone-sized helicopter is the first one to reach Mars and is now preparing for its maiden powered, controlled flight on the Red Planet. 

Over a century after the first powered flight on Earth, NASA transported aboard the Mars 2020 spacecraft that arrived at the Martian Planet last month. Called the small ‘Ingenuity’ helicopter, the ‘technology experiment’ will be subjected to several challenges with the most significant being the rarefied atmosphere of the planet that is also just one per cent the density of that of Earth’s.

All about NASA’s Ingenuity

Even though it can be called a ‘helicopter’, the appearance is closer to that of mini-drones. The “small but mighty passenger” aboard Perseverance is named, “Ingenuity, the Mars Helicopter” which weighs about 1.8 kilograms on Earth and has a fuselage about the size of a tissue box. The United States space agency also elaborated that it started out six years ago as an “ implausible prospect”.

NASA said, “Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California knew it was theoretically possible to fly in Mars’ thin atmosphere, but no one was sure whether they could build a vehicle powerful enough to fly, communicate, and survive autonomously with the extreme restrictions on its mass.”

Ingenuity is an ‘experimental flight test: NASA has stressed that the ‘Mars Helicopter’ or what known as a technology demonstration is also “a narrowly focused project that seeks to test a new capability for the first time”. It also informed that the helicopter is currently not carrying any science instruments and is not a part of Perseverance’s ‘science mission’.

Ingenuity will attempt to take only five test flights within a 30-Martian-day (31-Earth-day) demonstration window with the first being next week. NASA also said that the Red Planet will pose its own different set of challenges for Ingenuity to attempt its first powered, controlled flight.  The US space agency said, “Because the Mars atmosphere is so thin, Ingenuity is designed to be light, with rotor blades that are much larger and spin much faster than what would be required for a helicopter of Ingenuity’s mass on Earth.”

Image credits: @NASAJPL/@NASAPersevere/Twitter