This week, NASA's Mars spacecraft have been doing many exciting things. Including preparing the Ingenuity helicopter for flight, detecting Mars quakes, and taking selfies.
Mars Helicopter
Last February, NASA's $2 Billion Perseverance rover touched down on Mars. Attached beneath it's belly was a small experimental helicopter, called Ingenuity. If it succeeds, it will be the first powered flight on another planet. A small piece of the material used to in the Wright brothers plane is attached to the helicopter.
Over the last few weeks, NASA engineers have commanded Perseverance to carefully lower Ingenuity to the surface. Perseverance has successfully lowered Ingenuity down to the surface of Mars. The first flight of Ingenuity is scheduled tentatively for April 8th. The first flight will only go up about 3 meters, and will last about 30 seconds. The Perseverance rover will recorder HD video and audio during Ingenuity's first flight. You can hear some of the sounds that have already been recorded on Mars here.
If that historic first flight is successful, more test flights will follow. Perseverance's main mission on Mars is to collect rock samples, and store them for a future return to Earth.
Marsquakes
NASA's InSight lander has also been busy recently. Soon after InSight arrived on Mars in 2018, it deployed a seismometer to detect earthquakes, which recently detected two marsquakes with the magnitudes of 3.1 and 3.3. InSight has also started burying the cable which connects the seismometer to InSight with martian soil. Hopefully this will decrease the interference in the signal caused by temperature swings and intense winds.
The InSight mission is a part of the Discovery program. InSight's mission is to study the interior of Mars, using multiple science instruments. One of the key experiments InSight was supposed to perform on Mars was to have a small drill dig a few feet into the ground, but it failed to dig more than a few inches.
Tianwen 1
In March, one of the three spacecraft to arrive at Mars was Tianwen-1, a orbiter-lander-rover combo launched by China. Tianwen-1 is currently in orbit, and is scheduled to deploy the lander/rover this May. NASA also received permission to cooperate with China on this mission, NASA is usually barred from cooperating with China due to national security concerns. NASA hopes to be able to detect Tianwen-1 landing using their InSight lander's siesmometer.
Curiosity updates
During the last few weeks, Curiosity has been paused to examine an interesting site known as Mont Mercou. Mont Mercou is a large rock about 20 feet tall, on it's side are many layers of rock. This is an amazing site to do science on Mars, the different layers of Mont Mercou make it easy to analyze the geological history of this part of Mars. Curiosity has already drilled and analyzed a sample, snapped dozen of pictures, used multiple different scientific instruments and captured a "selfie". The "selfies" that curiosity takes of itself are made from combining dozens of photos taken by it's robotic arm, and the mast cam.
Curiosity is currently climbing up Mt. Sharp which is a 3-mile high mountain in the middle of Gale crater. Curiosity is currently transitioning from the Clay-bearing region of Mt. Sharp, to the Sulfate region. It's unknown how high up Mt. Sharp Curiosity will get, but it's nuclear generator should be able to last until about 2026.
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