Before heading off to search for signs of long ago Martian microbes, NASA’s Perseverance rover will first undertake what may be the most technologically exciting part of its mission: flying a helicopter.
Packed under the belly of Perseverance, a car-size robotic vehicle that landed on Mars last month, is Ingenuity, a four-pound mini-helicopter intended to demonstrate that flying on another planet is possible.
NASA officials announced on Tuesday that they had selected the site for this demonstration of extraterrestrial hovering — just north of where it landed.
The rover is driving to that location, where it will carefully drop off Ingenuity and then back away to observe the flights. Ingenuity is scheduled to take off no earlier than April 8, although Bob Balaram, the chief engineer of Ingenuity, said that could move up or back by a few days.
“It will have 31 Earth days to attempt to be the first helicopter to fly on another planet,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said during a news conference on Tuesday.
NASA officials have described this as a “Wright brothers moment” for space exploration, and on Tuesday, the agency revealed that Ingenuity includes an artifact from the first Wright airplane that took off from Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903.
“We are very proud to honor that experimental aircraft from long ago by carrying a small piece of fabric,” Mr. Balaram said.
Until 1997, all of the spacecraft sent to the surface of Mars had been stationary landers. But that year, the Pathfinder mission included something revolutionary for NASA: a wheeled robot. That rover, Sojourner, was roughly the size of a short filing cabinet, and planetary scientists quickly realized the benefits of being able to move around the Martian landscape. Four more NASA rovers including Perseverance have since followed to the red planet.
Ingenuity is in essence the aerial counterpart of Sojourner, a demonstration of a novel technology that may be used more extensively on later missions. The body of Ingenuity is about the size of a softball with four spindly legs sticking out. Two sets of blades, each about four feet from tip to tip, will spin in opposite directions to generate lift.
Flying on Mars is not a trivial endeavor. There is not much air to push against to generate lift. At the surface of Mars, the atmosphere is just 1/100th as dense as Earth’s. The lesser gravity — one-third of what you feel here — helps with getting airborne. But taking off from the surface of Mars is comparable to flying at an altitude of 100,000 feet on Earth. No helicopter on our planet has flown that high, and it’s more than two times the typical flying altitude of jetliners.
Since Perseverance’s flawless arrival at Mars on Feb. 18 within a 30-mile-wide crater named Jezero, engineers have been checking out the spacecraft and its instruments. That includes the first few short drives and firing a laser that vaporizes rock and soil to identify chemical elements.
Two microphones on Perseverance have been recording some of the sounds of the red planet, including the rustling of winds, the clicking of the laser as it zapped a rock about 10 feet away and the metallic clanking and scratching noises of the rover’s six wheels as they rolled across the terrain.
“Everything is going great so far,” Kenneth Farley, the mission’s project scientist, said last week during a virtual presentation at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. “But this is mostly the checkout phase. We’re not actually doing full-bore science yet.”
Dr. Farley said the scientists have already spotted signs of wind erosion on some rocks. Other rocks looked as if they had shaped by the flow of water. “This is quite promising for our study,” he said. The scientists also saw rocks with holes with them, which might be volcanic rocks that trapped bubbles of gas in them as they cooled.
The main science exploration will begin in early summer after the end of the Ingenuity tests.
Perseverance cannot take a direct route to a river delta at the rim of Jezero because of a treacherous field of sand dunes that lies between. Instead it will drive around the sand dunes.
The team members are still deciding whether to go to the north, a faster route, or to the south, which looks more geologically intriguing because it includes sites with mineral deposits that might be remnants of the river delta.
