Skip to main content

Mars helicopter to attempt a more complex flight on Thursday

NASA has announced that its Ingenuity Mars helicopter will attempt a second, more complex flight on the red planet on Thursday, April 22.

The flight attempt will come just three days after Ingenuity became the first-ever aircraft to achieve powered, controlled flight on another planet.

In a tweet on Wednesday, NASA said Ingenuity’s second flight will involve the machine climbing to a height of 5 meters before tilting slightly and flying two meters sideways. Ingenuity will then come to a stop, hover in place, and make turns to point its color camera in different directions. After that, it’ll come in to land.

The Mars helicopter’s maiden flight involved only a hover, 3 meters above the Martian surface. NASA said previously that each of Ingenuity’s five flights will be increasingly complex, with the final one expected to see it fly a distance of up to 300 meters.

How do you top #MarsHelicopter’s historic first flight? Go bigger.

We'll attempt a more challenging 2nd flight on April 22: 50-second flight time, climb to ~16 ft (5m), and 5º tilt to accelerate sideways ~7 ft (2m). We'll update you here with the results. https://t.co/tDmJJNjPPk pic.twitter.com/laAIcL4UgS

— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 21, 2021

Ingenuity’s flights are made autonomously, based on commands sent to the helicopter via the Perseverance rover, which will also record video of the flight. The rover and helicopter reached Mars together in dramatic fashion in February 2021 following a six-month journey from Earth.

NASA’s team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is overseeing the Mars mission, said Ingenuity’s rotors will be programmed to fire up at 5:30 a.m. ET (2:30 a.m. PT) on Thursday. NASA is yet to announce whether it will livestream the event on NASA TV in the same way that it did for the maiden flight earlier this week.

Flying a machine on Mars presents different challenges than Earth as the Martian atmosphere is about 100 times thinner than our own. To get off the ground, Ingenuity, which weighs 4 pounds and stands 19 inches high, had to spin its four carbon-fiber blades — arranged into two rotors — at 2,500 revolutions per minute (rpm), significantly faster than the approximately 500 rpm used by helicopters on Earth. The device also has to be able to handle Mars’ bitterly cold temperatures.

Writing about Ingenuity’s achievement when it became the first aircraft to take flight on another planet, MiMi Aung, Ingenuity Mars helicopter project manager at JPL, said that while every image of Ingenuity beamed back to Earth is special, “perhaps the one that will stay with me the most is that image from the helicopter’s navigation camera (below). Taken when the rotorcraft was 2.1 meters in the air, the black-and-white image shows the shadow of our beloved Ingenuity.”

Aung went on: “While it’s up to others to decide the image’s historical significance of this moment, when I first saw it, I immediately thought of the picture Buzz Aldrin took of his boot print on the lunar surface. That iconic image from Apollo 11 said ‘we walked on the Moon;’ ours says ‘we flew on another world.'”

Left to right: Buzz Aldrin took this iconic image of a bootprint on the Moon during the Apollo 11 moonwalk on July 20, 1969. NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter took this shot, capturing its own shadow, while hovering over the Martian surface on April 19, 2021, during the first instance of powered, controlled flight on another planet. It used its navigation camera, which autonomously tracks the ground during flight. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Ingenuity’s flight tests will pave the way for more sophisticated aircraft designs that can be used to survey the Martian surface from a close distance, unhindered by terrain. Such drone-like machines can also be used to collect data for mapping routes for future Mars rovers, and could even be used to explore other places in our solar system.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
The 60 best space photos of all time from Nasa, Hubble, and more
This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.

We're living through a golden age of space exploration, from rovers landing on Mars to astronauts living on board the International Space Station to the most complex and capable telescopes ever devised sending back stunning images of the cosmos. With technology like the high definition cameras on the Perseverance rover and the incredible sensitive infrared detectors on the James Webb Space Telescope, we're getting new views of the world beyond our own planet every day.

Some images of space stay entrenched in the public imagination, like the famous Pale blue Dot photos from 1990. It shows Earth as seen by the Voyager spacecraft just minutes before its camera was turned off. Traveling beyond the orbit of Pluto, the image shows the view when Voyager turned back around and viewed Earth -- the tiny, almost imperceptible dot seen against the emptiness of space.

Read more
NASA’s Mars copter flew high, fast, far, and long. Here are the key stats
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter.

An artist's impression of the Ingenuity helicopter in flight over Mars. NASA/JPL-Caltech / NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, is grounded for good. But it achieved a lot during its almost three-year adventure on the red planet.

Read more
NASA video celebrates Mars helicopter following its final flight
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is seen here in a close-up taken by Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard the Perseverance rover. This image was taken on April 5, the 45th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

Legacy of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter

NASA’s record-setting Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, has taken its final flight, the space agency confirmed on Thursday.

Read more