Take Flight with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter

We’re inviting you to join us for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s first attempt at powered, controlled flight on another planet. The helicopter team is targeting no earlier than Sunday, April 11, for the historic first flight.

A livestream confirming Ingenuity’s first flight is targeted to begin around 3:30 a.m. EDT Monday, April 12, on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website, and will livestream on multiple agency social media platforms, including the NASA YouTube and Facebook channels.

 

Ingenuity arrived at Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover. The helicopter is a technology demonstration with a planned test flight duration of up to 31 days (30 Mars days, or sols).

3-2-1 Launch – Three space travelers, including NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, launched on Friday, April 9, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station. During his mission, Vande Hei will work on hundreds of experiments to benefit life on Earth and learn more about living in space.

What’s Up – What are some skywatching highlights this month? In April, look for the rosy arch known as the Belt of Venus at sunset, and then find the constellation Leo overhead on April evenings.

 

 

 

Building Better Batteries – Although batteries are everywhere in everyday life, many still suffer breakdowns and failures. A new activity called SABERS is researching how to create a safer battery by using brand-new materials and construction methods.

20 Historic Years – Happy anniversary to our longest-operating spacecraft at Mars! Launched on April 7, 2001, the Mars Odyssey orbiter has helped locate water ice, assess landing sites, and study the Red Planet’s moons.

To Bennu and Back – This week, our OSIRIS-REx spacecraft completed its last flyover of asteroid Bennu. With its asteroid sample onboard, the spacecraft will drift away from the asteroid until May 10, when it will fire its thrusters and begin its journey back to Earth.

Meet Barbara Brown – As Director of Exploration Research and Technology at Kennedy Space Center, Brown is responsible for leading processing, assembly, integration, and testing of payloads and flight science experiments bound for the International Space Station.

 

«Now, here’s the interesting thing. I was a young Black female in an engineering role that was pretty much dominated by white males at the time, so it was not a norm for there to be females in the building – much less black females. I came to understand later that there was some skepticism on their part that I could do design engineering. I didn’t know that some of them, not all of them, were throwing things at me to show me I wasn’t qualified. But I would tackle their problems the same way I do anything else: if I don’t know it, I’ll go find it. I’ll research. I’ll dig. I’ll look for people that might have some experience that I don’t have and ask them. So, every hard problem that they threw at me, I solved. Eventually, my supervisor told me he didn’t know what he was getting into when he agreed to let me go to the other supervisors because now, they were coming to him with their hardest problems, asking, ‘Hey, can Barbara help with this?’ So, I started to broaden my experience base right away.» 

What happens when two galaxies collide? SOFIA mapped out the invisible magnetic fields pulsing through Centaurus A using infrared light. The results show how the merging of the two original galaxies created a new, reshaped, and contorted galaxy that not only combined the two galaxies’ magnetic fields but amplified their forces.

 

Credits: Optical: European Southern Observatory (ESO) Wide Field Imager; Submillimeter: Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy/ESO/Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX)/A.Weiss et al.; X-ray and Infrared: NASA/Chandra/R. Kraft; JPL-Caltech/J. Keene; SOFIA/L. Proudfit

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