The US Space Agency says it now expects the first helicopter to fly on Mars in early April.

 NASA flies an Ingenuity Mars helicopter in early April

The small helicopter was transported to the Red Planet by the Perseverance Chariot, which dramatically landed at Jezero Crater a little over a month ago.

The aircraft, dubbed Ingenuity, weighing 1.8kg, will make a series of short jumps into the rarefied Martian air.

If successful, it would be something of a "Wright Brothers Moment," according to NASA.

This is, of course, a reference to Orville and Wilbur Wright, who in 1903 conducted the historic first flight of a heavier-than-air powered plane here on Earth.

To determine the link, the office revealed that a postage-sized piece of fabric from the wing of a sibling plane had been attached to the creativity.

For now, the helicopter is still attached to perseverance, in its stomach. A protective cover was launched over the weekend, and in the coming days the spacecraft will be lowered onto the ground.

The engineers identified an area of ​​10 meters by 10 meters in Jezero and called it "the airport".

This is at one end of the 90-meter "flight zone", and five sorties will likely be carried out inside it.

Perseverance will strive to capture everything on camera.

"We will do our best to capture the creativity while flying," said Farah Ali Bay, a NASA engineer.

"We'll take pictures, we'd better take video."

She warned that this would be a challenge. Both the rover and the helicopter operate independently and carry separate hours. The timers have to be in sync for photography to capture the action.

Creativity is designed to be extremely lightweight. It must be in order to achieve lift in the thin Martian atmosphere.

It features four specially made carbon fiber blades arranged in two 1-meter rotors that rotate in opposite directions at around 2,400 rpm. That's several times faster than the blades triggering a passenger helicopter here on Earth.

Engineers plan for the first flight to be a simple flight that sees the helicopter rise about 3 meters above the ground, hover and spin for about 30 seconds, before it comes back down.

If all goes well, subsequent trips get even more complicated.

"The manner we're currently planning is for the first three flights to show basic capability - fly over, cross over, go a longer distance down the flight area and back again," said Havard Grib, chief pilot of Ingenuity. BBC News.

"If things really go well, we might  expand our capabilities. But we haven't planned that in detail."

When asked if the team might try something exciting on a final flight, he declined to speculate.

Lori Glaze, who directs the planetary science effort at NASA, said the innovation could open up possibilities for aerial exploration in the future.

"Can a helicopter explore the future in search of rovers and help graph chart the most efficient path for the best science? Can we help future human missions with aerial capabilities?" I thought.

"These are another day's questions, but the tech demos offer us the opportunity to be creative and test new things."

The US Space Agency (NASA) has approved a mission called Dragonfly, which will use a robotic helicopter to fly across the surface of Saturn's moon Titan in the 1930s.

The Soviets were the first to fly aerial vehicles into another world with Vega balloons in the atmosphere of Venus in the 1980s.

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