NASA Mars Helicopter’s First Flight: When to Watch

The experimental Ingenuity vehicle is expected to complete a short but historic up-and-down flight on Monday morning.

Early on Monday, a robotic helicopter that NASA sent to Mars will try to rise a few feet in the air, hover and come back down. With that simple feat, it would become the first machine to fly through the wispy air of the red planet. NASA officials have been likening it to the Wright brothers flight in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, N.C. Never before has something like an airplane or a helicopter taken off on another world. The Mars helicopter, named Ingenuity, traveled from Earth tucked under NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed in February on the mission to search for signs of ancient life near a dried-up river delta. A couple of weeks ago, Perseverance dropped Ingenuity on a flat Martian plain ahead of the flight tests. Ingenuity is small. Its main body is about the size of a softball with four spindly legs sticking out. On top are two sets of blades, each about four feet from tip to tip. They will spin in opposite directions at about 2,500 rotations per minute, the rapid speeds needed to generate enough lift for Ingenuity to get off the ground.