NASA is Sending a Helicopter to Mars, but What For?
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:
NASA is sending a helicopter to Mars, but what for?:
NASA's mission to send another rover to Mars is set to culminate in a successful landing on February 18, 2021, but that's not all the agency is sending to the Red Planet.
The Perseverance rover - once it lands next month - will begin scouring a section of Mars that astronomers believe could have hosted and supported microbial life in the past.
But a second passenger aboard the lander vehicle will be meant to do something else entirely.
The Mars Helicopter - also known as Ingenuity - will deploy alongside the rover, and will be NASA's attempt at trying to achieve successful controlled flight on Mars for the very first time.
Ingenuity weighs only four pounds, and is described as a "small, but mighty passenger". Though it has a fuselage (main body) no bigger than a tissue box, it's supposedly strong enough to brave the harsh weather conditions on the planet during flight.
Started as a wishful project about six years ago, the engineers behind Ingenuity understood that while it was theoretically possible to fly in Mars' super-thin atmosphere, there was no real conviction that they'd be able to build a vehicle that could fly, communicate, and survive on its own on Mars.
But after rounds of research and testing, the team have managed to create a flying vehicle that has so far survived all tests emulating Mars' environment, and the next step is to make it fly on the Red Planet for real.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.