However, Data from Ingenuity’s first flight attempt will reach NASA early Monday morning by 06:30. If the flight takes off as planned on Monday, NASA will have livestreams beginning around 6:15AM ET on Monday hosted on YouTube, its website, Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch.
Dimanche 18 avril 2021 ((rezonodwes.com))–
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter is slated to attempt the first-ever powered flight on another world at 3:30AM ET on Monday. The twin-blade rotorcraft will try to ascend 10 feet above ground and hover in place for 30 seconds while cameras on NASA’s Perseverance rover record the historic attempt from a distance.
The four-pound Ingenuity copter landed on Mars February 18th attached to the underbelly of Perseverance, NASA’s latest Mars rover whose main mission is to search for signs of ancient Martian life. Perseverance has set aside time to witness Ingenuity’s flight attempt and report the results back to Earth. Ingenuity’s Monday flight test is the first of five planned within a 31-day window that kicked off last week. If all goes well, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California will start planning for the next four, which could see the craft soar higher and travel farther, depending the results of its first attempt.
JPL engineers have sought to set expectations for the test flight during recent press conferences: “This is really hard,” said Elsa Jensen, an operations lead for one of the cameras aboard Perseverance that’ll be fixed on Ingenuity. Tests have gone well over the last week, Jansen added. “But we know there’ll be surprises.”
How to watch
If the flight takes off as planned on Monday, NASA will have livestreams beginning around 6:15AM ET on Monday hosted on YouTube, its website, Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch.
Because of the long data delay between Mars and Earth, we won’t see live video of the flight attempt — it will probably take a few days to get that footage. Instead, NASA’s livestreams will show engineers gradually analyzing data from Mars that will confirm whether or not Ingenuity survived its attempt. Did it fly as expected, or did it get swept away by a gust of wind? Did an alien steal it? We’ll know as soon as engineers find out.
Tune in early on Monday to see how the historic flight goes.
