Perseverance

Earlier today, NASA briefed the public on the Perseverance rover’s current status on Mars, discussed highlights from the mission so far, and announced the discovery of organic molecules that could be associated with life. But this discovery comes with an 82 million-mile caveat.

You might have forgotten about Mars‘ two little moons. Smaller and not so circular, they aren’t as crazy as those found around Jupiter or Saturn. However, they are still special because we can see them pass in front of the Sun like our own, and through Perseverance, we can see Mars’ solar eclipses with better resolution than ever before.

NASA’s flagship Mars rover Perseverance has been exploring Jezero Crater for over a year now. As it traveled to its newest destination, Perseverance spotted its own parachute that it used to descend towards Mars’ surface safely.

How on Earth (err.. Mars?) has it been a full year since NASA’s latest Mars rover landed on the surface of Mars!

The rover launched back on July 30, 2020 on an Atlas V 541 rocket and traveled for over 200 days before landing on the surface of the Red Planet.

The Perseverance Rover has collected two samples so far on the Mars, and NASA says they reveal the presence of both ancient water and salt in Jezero Crater

The Perseverance rover obtained its first rock sample on Mars. NASA plans to return this rock-core, along with future samples back to Earth on future Mars missions.

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.

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.

Earlier this morning Ingenuity took off for the fourth and most daring flight of its campaign. It took several hours for flight data to be received by the JPL team but all signs look that it was a successful flight.

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.

Tomorrow, April 22nd, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity will be making its second flight.

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.

We have been following the deployment of Ingenuity since it first landed on Mars, on the belly of Perseverance, back in February. NASA has been working towards the first flight of Ingenuity, which is scheduled to occur late on April 11th.

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.