The Ingenuity Mars helicopter has successfully passed an important test. But there is no date for the first launch yet.

As you know, the first flight of the Ingenuity Martian helicopter was postponed due to the failure of one of the preliminary testing stages. More precisely, the stage of high-speed rotation of the screw.

As a result, on April 11, the flight did not take place, and NASA scientists said that they would try to solve the problem by updating the software. And yesterday it became known that the test was passed. By the way, it happened on Wilbur Wright’s birthday.

By the way, the scientists managed to do without reinstalling the helicopter software, limiting themselves to adding several new commands to the sequence of actions when passing the test. True, they can still update the software for the helicopter, but this takes time.

The first flight of Ingenuity will be quite short and test flight. In total, scientists are counting on five flights of 90 seconds maximum, but they assume that the helicopter, like many rovers, can work much longer. It is also worth noting that the helicopter itself in the pictures may seem quite tiny, since there are no guidelines for understanding the size. Ingenuity’s coaxial propellers are 1.2m in diameter and 0.8m in height.

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