A small helicopter called Ingenuity, which was transported to Mars on board the Perseverance rover, is set to launch on April 11 at the earliest, US space agency NASA said on Thursday.
"#MarsHelicopter is preparing to do something that's never been done: controlled, powered flight on another planet," NASA tweeted.
Photos shot by the helicopter and other data would arrive on Earth the following day, April 12, NASA added.
The tiny helicopter, which weighs 1.8 kilograms, already sent its first status report to the control centre in Pasadena, California after Perseverance's landing.
Ingenuity is to take off from a 10-by-10 metre platform. During its flight, the helicopter is to reach an altitude of about 3 metres, remain in one place for around thirty seconds, turn around and come back down to land.
The helicopter is powered with lithium batteries and could make several more flight attempts for about one month, defying the extreme conditions on Mars with temperatures of minus 90 degrees Celsius, low gravity and a thin atmosphere.
A piece of history is aboard Ingenuity: A small amount of the material that covered one of the wings of the Wright brothers' aircraft that flew over North Carolina in December 1903, in what was the first powered and controlled flight on Earth.
The rover Perseverance, which weighs around 1,000 kilograms and is the size of a small car, landed on Mars in February, after 472 kilometres travelled in 203 days of flight. It landed in a dried lake spanning 45 kilometres called Jezero Crater, which it is to inspect in the coming two years.
Source: DPA
