NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter poses for glamor shot on the Mars surface

Summary (IA Generated)

NASA‘s Ingenuity helicopter successfully deployed onto the surface of Mars Saturday, its travel buddy the Perseverance rover capturing it posing triumphantly on the first Martian flight field.

The Mars helicopter, a four-pound drone with a nearly four-foot blade span, will attempt to make humanity’s first-ever flight on an alien planet in April, no earlier than the 11th.

A warm day on Mars is a freezing one on Earth, and Ingenuity could be sitting in temperatures that get as low as -130 degrees Fahrenheit, said Ingenuity mechanical lead Josh Ravich in an interview with Mashable about the mission.

Although Ingenuity’s only objective as a tech demonstration is to simply prove that scientists can get something to fly on Mars, a planet with an atmosphere that’s 1 percent as dense as Earth’s, it is also equipped with a camera that can send data to the rover, which can then be relayed back to Earth.

‘You can’t drive a rover down into a ditch but you can fly a helicopter down into the ravine.

In a 90-second flight, a drone could cover nearly a kilometer, Ravich said.