NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover and Ingenuity Mars helicopter is preparing to deploy the helicopter to the surface of the Red Planet. This video provides a mission update from Farah Alibay, Perseverance integration lead for Ingenuity, and Tim Canham, Ingenuity operations lead. Ingenuity is the first aircraft on Mars and the first attempt at powered, controlled flight on another planet. If Ingenuity succeeds, future Mars exploration could include an ambitious aerial dimension. For more information on Perseverance, go to https://mars.nasa.gov/perseverance. For more information on the Mars Ingenuity helicopter, go to: https://go.nasa.gov/ingenuity. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech — NASA — Mars, Up Close Source: NASA (https://images.nasa.gov/) Licence: Public domain (work of the U.S. federal government, 17 U.S.C. §105) Audio is served by the publisher; Budi does not host or modify it.
0:06NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover is getting the lay of the land after landing on the Red Planet a few weeks ago. I'm Marina Jureka with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. I am joined by Persevance Integration Lead for the helicopter, Farah Alabeh. She coordinates the activities between the helicopter and the rover. And Ingenuity Operations Lead Tim Canham. His job is to operate the helicopter once it's on the surface of Mars. Welcome you guys! Hi Mario. Thank you. Now Farah, what are the next steps for Perseverance? We are just about getting ready for the helicopter mission here. We've passed all latest reviews and we're just finishing the checkouts of the mobility system and the arm on Mars, ready to support Ingenuity. And Tim,
0:54you must be getting so excited for Ingenunity to stand on its own on the surface of Mars. What steps need to happen before that for you and your team? Yes, we are definitely very excited. Right now the helicopter is still attached to the rover so we're keeping it warm and fed. We're charging the batteries and we're also working with FARA's team to identify a final site for the helicopter. Now for both of you there seems to be a lot of steps and preparations that go into the helicopter phase. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yeah for sure once we start the helicopter mission the first thing that we have to do is drop the debris shield. That was the shield that protected us during entry descendant landing.
1:34Then we're going to travel several days to the helicopter drop-off location. Once we get there, it's actually going to take us about a week to deploy the helicopter. It's currently horizontal and we have to go through several steps and each one of which we want to image and have ground in the loop before we get to that very last step where we do that last separation between the rover and the helicopter and then drive away from it. Yes, and our team is working very closely with FAR to make sure our plans are in place All our commands are ready, and we've additionally been working with the rover team to identify the perfect site for the helicopter that should be flat with not too many big rocks on it but
2:12also good texture so our navigation cameras can find their way across the surface. A lot of things to look forward to! So to get the latest updates follow at NASA Persevere on Twitter and Facebook. Take a deeper dive on the mission's website mars.nasa.gov slash perseverance where you can also find all the raw images being sent back by
This transcript was generated automatically from the recording, so it will contain mistakes — especially around names and places.