Ingenuity Helicopter Reports Home From Mars

Hope for human survival on the moon now seems more feasible as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Red Planet Mars record a big one this week with the Perseverance rover landing on the Red Planet's surface.

The first step in trying to fly Ingenuity on the surface of Mars is to deploy the helicopter from the rovers and have it phone home. This is one of the more exciting experiments that perseverance has taken to the surface of Mars is the Ingenuity helicopter.

The first helicopter ever sent to another world phoned home, letting mission controllers on earth know that it survived the "seven minutes of terror"  landing aboard NASA's Perseverance.

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According to slashgear.com, Perseverance touched down on the surface of Mars on Friday 18, and both it and Ingenuity are awake and communicating with controllers on Earth. Controllers at JP  received a downlink on Friday at 6:30 PM EST through the mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, indicating that Ingenuity and its base station are both operating normally.

Ingenuity Mars helicopter operations lead at JPL, Tim Canham said both the helicopter and its base station appear to be working great. He noted on Friday that the team would move forward with charging helicopter batteries on Saturday. On Saturday, February 20, the power-up procedure did happen to charge the six lithium-ion batteries to roughly 30 percent of their full capacity.

Data will be beamed back after reaching that charge level to help scientists determine how to proceed with future battery-charging sessions. The plan is to charge the helicopter batteries to about 35 percent over the next few days and conduct weekly charging sessions to keep the helicopter warm.

Currently, Perseverance is powering Ingenuity, but it will use its solar panels once deployed to the surface of Mars. Mission control says that after Perseverance deploys Ingenuity, the helicopter will have a 30-Martian-day test flight window that spans 31 days here on Earth. The helicopter will fly in a few months and will be the first flight of an aircraft on another world.