The Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity, has successfully landed on the Martian surface, marking a significant achievement following its release from the Perseverance rover, which serves as its mothership.
On Tuesday, the robot companion, after landing on the surface of the red planet, took a selfie with the helicopter and sent it to Earth.
NASA’s Mars Helicopter
Rover used the designed robotic arm that has a mounted camera at the end to catch the picture.
The picture showed the helicopter 4 meters away from the rover on the left side.
The camera that the rover used is a WATSON, which is an Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and Engineering.
Watson is a part of the instrument of SHERLOC, which is Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals.
The selfie that the rover took came back with 62 individual images that got stitched together by this mission’s team on Earth.
One of the pictures showed the rover looking at Ingenuity.
The helicopter Ingenuity was stored in the belly of the mother ship Perseverance before launching it.
Night on the Red Planet
Once it separated Perseverance on April 3, it had to pass an important milestone, which was surviving the night on the red planet without the supply of the mother ship to keep it warm.
On April 5, the rover took a detailed picture where Ingenuity sitting on the Mars surface using its zoomable cameras.
The 4-pound helicopter, Ingenuity, has cameras of its own that can take pictures. It has already sent a small color image of the Mars surface.
April takes the spotlight as the month of innovation, signifying a big moment in space exploration. More precisely, on April 11, we’re in for a historic event – the first-ever trial run of a helicopter on a different planet. This event marks not just a date but a momentous leap in achieving the first powered and controlled flight beyond Earth. Get ready for an extraordinary journey in the vast expanse of space exploration!
If everything goes according to plan, then NASA will share the results it gets on April 12.
The team in charge of the helicopter has been training and putting it through different tests to ensure it’s ready for the flight.
The researchers will use the MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer) instrument on the rover will check the weather and the wind patterns of Mars. The researchers will look at the dust levels, wind speed, pressure, humidity, radiation, and temperature of the ground.
In the initial stages of Ingenuity’s exploration on the Martian surface, MEDA recorded daytime temperatures at a chilly -7.6°F, dropping even lower to a bone-chilling -117.4°F during the night. Alongside these frigid temperatures, winds blew at a speed of 22 miles per hour.
In a statement, the deputy principal investigator of MEDA, Manuel de la Torre Juárez, said:
“We’re very excited to see MEDA working well.MEDA’s reports will provide a better picture of the environment near the surface. Data from MEDA and other instrument experiments will reveal more pieces of the puzzles on Mars and help prepare for human exploration. We hope that its data will help make our designs stronger and our missions safer.”
In the first flight, Ingenuity will open up its 4-foot blades and lift in the air, making a turn and landing back down after 30 seconds.
A few hours after the flight, Perseverance will send the helicopter data and any videos and images.
This data and image will help determine whether the flight was successful.
After that Ingenuity will go five flights in the 31 Earth days.
The Perseverance rover will explore Jexero Crater, where a lake used to be 3.9 billion years ago, searching for any microbial life for the next two years.
What is the purpose of the Mars Ingenuity helicopter?
The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is a tiny, self-sufficient aircraft. It got dispatched to Mars to run some flight experiments and figure out if we could make something fly in a controlled way on the Red Planet.
