Mars helicopter has a little bit of NC onboard

NASA' Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) rescheduled plans for the Mars Ingenuity helicopter's first flight to Wednesday after a high-speed run-up of the helicopter's rotors was automatically stopped.

Even though commands to Perseverance and Ingenuity are sent from Earth at the speed of light, it still takes more than 15 minutes to travel the more than 173 million miles to Mars... and back. The robots have to make a lot of their own decisions as a result, and they are very conservative.

Ingenuity is a technology demonstration, but can also serve as a scout of sorts, flying ahead of the rover to investigate scientifically interesting areas.

The four pound drone is made up of more than 1,500 individual pieces of carbon fiber, flight-grade aluminum, silicon, copper, foil and foam. A swatch of cotton fabric from Wright brothers' Flyer that made its first flight in 1903 at Kitty Hawk is onboard Ingenuity as well.

Originally purchased from a Dayton, Ohio department store, the cotton fabric (called "Pride of the West Muslin) covered the wings of Flyer 1. A half inch square swatch provided by the Wright Brothers National Museum was wrapped with insulative tape around a cable under the helicopter's solar panel in a JPL clean room during its construction.

There are many challenges to flying on Mars. With 1/3 the gravity of Earth, getting off the ground is a little easier. But with only 1% the atmosphere, there is a lot less for rotor blades to push on. Ingenuity overcomes this by rotating its blades at about 2500 rpm. For comparison, Sky 5's rotor blades rotate at about 450 rpm.

Ingenuity will fly itself using a combination of inertial sensors, an altimeter and terrain matching software that compares what its cameras are seeing 30 times each second to images provided orbit.

This will be the first powered flight on another planet. The first lighter than air flight was back In 1985 when the Soviet Vega mission released a pair of helium balloons which transmitted data about Venus's dense atmosphere for 46 hours.

This first test of several will check the helicopter's ability to lift off, hover, and safely land. It is expected to last about 20-30 seconds and will include a mid-air pirouette and some photos of the flight zone and the Perseverance rover about 200 feet away.

Up to four additional tests within the football field sized flight zone are planned over a 30 sol (Mars day) period. Although capable of flying much higher, tests will be limited to a ceiling of about 16 feet.

Sunday morning's test was scheduled for 12:30 pm local Mars time or around 3:30 am Eastern. Wednesday's attempt will likely be around the same time

The best time to fly is late enough in the day for sunlight to sufficiently charge the helicopter's solar powered batteries, or keeping it warm and fed as JPL engineers have said, but before solar heating of the Martian surface can create winds that could make flight more difficult.

Before launching for Mars, the helicopter was tested for nearly three years in a 25-feet wide, 85-feet tall vacuum chamber. Engineers simulated the Martian atmosphere by pumping all but 1% of the air and simulated Mars gravity using a computerized tether that offloads about 2/3 of Earth's gravity.