Persistence has a proud parenting moment in this picture that looks like he’s waiting at the bus stop with a kid on the first day of school.
The Mars 2020 rover took this selfie with the Ingenuity helicopter preparing for the first controlled flight in another world. On April 3, Ingenuity was removed from its carbon fiber compartment on the bottom of Perseverance. Subsequent Ingenuity tills are doing well (engineers on Earth command the rotors to spin yesterday, see below) and on Sunday April 11th it will make its first attempt at powered flight.
The selfie was taken on April 6th (Sol 46 of the mission) with a camera called WATSON (Wide Angle Topography Sensor for Operations and Engineering), which is part of the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument on End of the rover’s robotic arm. Ingenuity was about four meters from Perseverance. The image was created by stitching together 62 separate images. Here is an article on how the rovers take the “selfies”.
With Perseverance now further removed from the helicopter, the proud parent will stay close for Ingenuits’ first flight and the 30-day test window to provide “support” and relay orders from Earth. About 60 meters away is a lookout point where Perseverance “observes” the first flight of the Mars helicopter (also known as photos with its cameras).
I drove about halfway to my vantage point, where I will watch the flight test of the # MarsHelicopter from a distance of about 60 meters.
I will have zoom cameras focused on the flight. In the meantime, you can see Ingenuity in these views from my navigation cameras. pic.twitter.com/fmmgJRLIVg
– NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) April 9, 2021
For the first flight, JPL mission controllers send flight instructions to Perseverance, which they forward to Ingenuity. JPL says several factors will determine the exact time of flight, including modeling local wind patterns obtained from measurements from the rover’s weather station, the MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer). Ingenuity runs its rotors at 2537 RPM and takes off if all final self-checks look good. After ascending at a speed of 1 meter per second, the helicopter hovers 3 meters above the surface for up to 30 seconds. Ingenuity then descends and lands back on the surface of Mars.
We can expect details of the first flight (technical data and possibly pictures confirming whether the flight was successful) to return to Earth in the early hours of April 11th. Data is currently expected to arrive around 3:30 a.m. EDT / 12:30 p.m. PDT / 7 UTC. A post-flight press conference is currently scheduled at 11:00 a.m. EDT / 8:00 a.m. PDT / 3:00 p.m. UTC.
A pre-flight briefing will take place today (Friday, April 9) at 10 a.m. PDT / 1 p.m. EDT / 5 p.m. UTC. You can see here.
Further reading: NASA’s Mars 2020 website
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