Epic NASAs Ingenuity Helicopter Poised to Forever Change the Way We Explore Other Planets – The Daily Galaxy –Great Discoveries Channel

NASAs Ingenuity mini-helicopter is charging up its solar panels and spinning its blades in preparation to fly above the Martian surface. The 4-pound drone is set to lift off early on Monday in an atmosphere just 1/100th as dense as Earths, rise 10 feet above Mars Jezero Crater, harboring, NASA hopes, fossilized life that might have thrived billions of years ago, then gently touch back down. The insect-like craft uses a microchip that is comparable to what was found in cellphones a few years ago about 150 times the computing power available to the much larger Perseverance rover.

The landing site in Jezero Crater with landforms reaching as far back as 3.6 billion years old, could potentially answer important questions in planetary evolution and astrobiology, said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASAs Science Mission Directorate. It will revolutionize how we think about Mars and its ability to harbor life.

A livestream confirming Ingenuitys first flight is targeted to begin around 3:30 a.m. EDT Monday, April 12, on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agencys website, and will livestream on multiple agency social media platforms, including the JPL YouTube and Facebook channels.

Taking off from the surface of Mars, reports Kenneth Chang for The New York Times, is comparable to flying at an altitude of 100,000 feet on Earth. No helicopter on our planet has flown that high, and its more than two times the typical flying altitude of jetliners. The entire flight should last about 40 seconds, but it could forever change the way NASA explores other planets. Future Mars helicopters could scout out canyons and mountains that rovers cant access, fly in and out of craters, or even do reconnaissance for astronauts.

Something Much Stranger? Jezero Crater Mystery, Landing Site for NASAs Mars Perseverance Rover

Each world gets only one first flight, MiMi Aung, the project manager for Ingenuity, said in a briefing on Friday. The Wright brothers achieved the first flight on Earth. Ingenuity is poised to go for being the first on Mars.

Even if conditions at Jezero Crater are perfect, though, flying on Mars is challenging with the air there has just 1% the density of Earths atmosphere, the equivalent of flying three times higher than the peak of Mount Everest. To catch enough lift with so few molecules to push against, NASA reports, the helicopters two pairs of blades spin in opposite directions at a speed roughly eight times faster than a passenger helicopter on Earth.

There were some people who doubted we could generate enough lift to fly in that thin Martian atmosphere, Amiee Quon, who tested Ingenuity in a Mars-simulation chamber on Earth, said in the Friday briefing.

Suppose that it does, in fact, work. What we will have proven is that we can add an aerial dimension to discovery and exploration on Mars, Zurbuchen said. That aerial dimension, of course, opens up aspects of science and overall exploration that, frankly, at this moment in time, are only our dreams.

A NASA First Helicopter Will Survey Mars Jezero Crater for Signs of Life

Were Already Colonizing Mars It starts with Instagram posts and discarded parachutes, and the sense that a world is ours for the taking. , The first attempt at powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet. Or, to put it in more mundane terms, Mars will have become another airport, reports Slate.

That landing spot was named by the NASA team Octavia E. Butler Landing. a homage to Butler as a visionary artist and as the first sci-fi author to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. The name conjoins the daring mission of the Perseverance rover with the legacy of a luminous writer of intellectually daring novels. It also meaningfully honors a Black woman, on behalf of NASA.

Few writers. says Chrsitopher Schaberg for Slate, have been as acutely aware of the moral quandaries of human domination and planetary colonization (see Dawn), and of how colonies function as palimpsests of slavery and other cross-generational patterns of violence (consider Kindred). To call the landing site Octavia E. Butler Landing is somewhat paradoxical; it might as well have been named Be Careful What You Wish For.'

The Perseverance mission is reminiscent of an older way of doing science [where] naturalists and other explorers traveled, welcome or not, to faraway places to gather trunkfuls of specimens for closer study, writes Marina Koren at The Atlantic.

The Daily Galaxy via NASA, New York Times, Insider, Slate, and The Atlantic

NASA/JPL-Caltech IMAGW

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Epic NASAs Ingenuity Helicopter Poised to Forever Change the Way We Explore Other Planets - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel