NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, aboard Perseverance Mars rover which is expected to land on February 18, 2021, in the Jezero Crater of Mars, achieved an important milestone on August 15. The tiny helicopter is set to become the first-ever aircraft to fly to another planet.
The team running Ingenuity powered up the helicopter on August 7 and brought it to up to 35% charge using the nuclear power supply on Perseverance. The helicopter is powered by six lithium-ion batteries.
“This was a big milestone, as it was our first opportunity to turn on Ingenuity and give its electronics a ‘test drive’ since we launched on July 30,” said Tim Canham, Ingenuity’s operations lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.
“Since everything went by the book, we’ll perform the same activity about every two weeks to maintain an acceptable state of charge,” he added.
Both rotorcrafts are currently about 28 million miles from Earth and have around 264 million miles to go before reaching Mars.
Along with Ingenuity helicopter, Perseverance houses an experiment named MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) that will produce oxygen using the existing carbon dioxide in Mars’ atmosphere as a technology demonstration.
These instruments aboard the rover will ‘Astro-biologically’ analyse the red planet once it reaches the surface.
