Mars

In his latest prediction, SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter that he expects humans to land on Mars in 2029.

This week, the target launch date for the James Webb Space telescope was announced, SpaceX released a new render of Starship Super Heavy, and Inspiration4 works toward launch.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) sent back nearly 300 new photos of the Red Planet which were released September 1st.

A press release from China’s National Space Science Center provided a first look at a prototype for their new Martian Helicopter.

Ingenuity recently completed its 13th flight on Mars. Mars helicopter campaign extended from the initially planned 5 flights and is now serving as a valuable tool to assist with route planning for the Perseverance rover.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover reached the Red Planet in February, and weeks of never-before-attempted Ingenuity helicopter flights followed. Now Perseverance is ready to knock out a major mission of its own: collect Mars samples.

The Mars 2020 mission consisted of two main payloads, the Perseverance rover and a technology demonstration helicopter called Ingenuity. Perseverance was the 6th rover ever sent to the Martian surface and was based on the successful design of the 2011 Curiosity rover. On this day, Mars 2020 launched to space.

Since we last covered Ingenuity, shortly after its sixth flight, it has been hard at work exploring the Martian surface. Ingenuity has certainly proved useful to Martian exploration, making these flights look routine.

Mars Helicopter Ingenuity was originally expected to complete its campaign after just five flights. After extraordinary performance on in the initial flights, demonstrating the possibility of powered flight on Mars, NASA JPL decided to extend the campaign to gather more information.

Perseverance, Ingenuity, and all the other American bots on Mars now have company. China became the second-ever country to successfully land a rover on the red planet today. Zhurong, named for the god of fire in Chinese folk tales, is roughly the size of NASA’s 2004 Spirit and Opportunity robots.

We’ve been deep diving through Perseverance and Ingenuity since before the Mars 2020 mission lifted off from Cape Canaveral last year. Still, seeing NASA’s Mars rover and first-ever helicopter and their first month spent on the red planet still wows us.

This week’s Saturday Night Live was hosted by none other than SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. This lead to many references to all of Musk’s companies, one of the highlights of the night though was a skit showing off SpaceX’s future base on Mars.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter has wowed us from Earth with its first flights over the Red Planet. After just 3 flights the tech demo has completed all of its test objectives and will now push the envelope for what it can do.

Mars Helicopter Ingenuity completed its third flight on Sunday. Images and video have been arriving back on Earth since then, and on Tuesday a notable image arrived.

After the success of its first flight at the beginning of this week, Ingenuity took its second flight early this morning. This flight pushed the tech demo to do more challenging tasks as they step through their testing campaign this month.

After the announcement of the first successful flight of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter people have taken to social media to share their excitement, including companies and celebrities.

On a livestream from mission control early this morning, the Ingenuity team received the very first data confirming the successful flight of Mars Helicopter Ingenuity.

After delays in the first flight of Ingenuity due to a failure to complete the first high-speed spin test, Ingenuity may be back on track. NASA shared today that Ingenuity has successfully completed a high-speed spin test; an important test before the first flight.

[Update Below] On April 10th, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory shared in a Status Update that the first flight of Mars Helicopter Ingenuity has been rescheduled to No Earlier Than April 14th. Ingenuity underwent a low-speed spin test of its rotor yesterday, reaching 50rpm. When the helicopter moved to begin the full-speed spin test of its rotors the watchdog timer expired.

The Mars Helicopter Ingenuity is an exciting new development in planetary exploration. The ability to have powered, controlled flights on another planet opens up new possibilities for future robotic and, eventually, human missions. Years of work have led up to Ingenuitity’s first flight, no earlier than April 11th, and the teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are currently working through the helicopter’s 10-day long deployment process.