By Nneka Nwogwugwu
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has announced that its perseverance rover will carry one of the strangest devices ever seen on Mars when it lands next week.
The strongest device is a drone that will make the first controlled flights on an extra-terrestrial planet.
The drone weighs just 4 pounds, and it will stay stored beneath the rover’s belly while Perseverance runs through its initial surface checks and experiments, NatureNews gathered.
Tim Canham, the operations lead for the Ingenuity project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said that about the middle of April, the rover will scout out a flat area without large rocks to deploy the drone, and soon after that Perseverance will release Ingenuity to make the first flights on Mars.
“It’s pretty unique in that it’s a helicopter that can fly around.
“There was a balloon mission on Venus years ago, so we can’t claim to be the first aircraft.
Canham will coordinate the five test flights scheduled for the Ingenuity drone over 30 days, with each at least three days apart.
“The first flight will be very basic – it will just go straight up, hover and go straight down.
“After that, we’ll do a couple of flights where we go horizontally, to test how it works,” he said.
The car-size Perseverance rover has seven complex scientific instruments, so it can take panoramic video, monitor the weather, perform ultraviolet and X-ray spectroscopy on anything it finds, and look for signs of ancient microbial life.