NASA is preparing for the first Flight Creativity has been around for a long time. As a reminder, it is an unmanned drone that has reached Mars with the persistent rover. It will be the first device to go into the air on the Red Planet and will do so as part of an experiment (NASA wants to check how many elevator flights there are).
NASA has done a “reverse origami” and is delaying takeoff
A few days ago, we reported that NASA had ordered the removal of the Ingenuity drone cover, and we were able to see it in the photo for the first time. Perseverance (the helicopter attached to the rover chassis) has already left the cover behind, and Ingenuity has created what is called “reverse origami”.
This is what NASA engineers call the process of turning a helicopter and dismantling all of its components. In theory, it is nearly ready-to-fly, but is still attached to the rover chassis. The final step is to loosen the hook and plant it on the Martian regolith.
Step by step, creativity prepares to come to the surface. Once everything is in place, I can cut it off
– We read on NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover Twitter channel, which is played from a first-person perspective.
Initially, NASA planned for that first a lot Creativity will take place “no later than April 8. But this week it was announced that the launch will be slightly delayed, and current estimates place the first flight on or after April 11th.”
In the second half of March, NASA found the perfect location for Ingenuity’s first flight. This is a flat area just north of the Perseverance landing site, which should be the first-ever landing site for such an aircraft. Because when creativity takes off, it will be the first device to use lift to fly extraterrestrial.
As NASA engineers assure, lift-off flights on Mars are definitely more difficult than on Earth. All because of the very thin atmosphere (the pressure on Mars is about 100 times less than the pressure on Earth), which makes it difficult to get enough strength to hold even a small device in the air like creativity. We explained this in more detail a few months ago in the text below:
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