NASA's Ingenuity helicopter successfully deployed onto the surface of Mars Saturday,порнография полнометражка 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. If the first flight is successful, it could attempt up to four more over a 30-sol (Mars day) period.
The deployment of Ingenuity from Perseverance took roughly 10 sols. It's a long, delicate process designed to cause as little disturbance as possible. Now that it's on the ground, Persy is driving away to a safe distance.
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As NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab noted in the above tweet, Ingenuity will have to survive the night. 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. The helicopter is designed to keep itself warm using a solar-powered battery.
Before Ingenuity takes off, it still has a host of tests to complete to make sure everything is working properly, including its rotors.
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.
SEE ALSO: See where NASA just zapped this odd Martian rock with a laserIf everything goes well, Ingenuity could pave the way for future drones in space, which have certain advantages over slower, land-locked rovers.
"The ability to go places you can't otherwise, like to go up a mountain, or go down a ravine," Ravich said. "You can't drive a rover down into a ditch but you can fly a helicopter down into the ravine."
Fleets of drones in the future could map regions or even take samples from a wide range of areas relatively quickly. In a 90-second flight, a drone could cover nearly a kilometer, Ravich said.