NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter team has targeted Sunday, April 11, 2021 for Ingenuity’s’ expositional and maiden test flight. Then during a LIVEstream on Monday, April 12 at 0330hrs EDT they will announce the results of the test flight on NASA Television. To catch the events LIVE as they happen and make sure your browser is tuned to NASA.gov or if you have the NASA app you can follow along LIVE there as well. NASA also has their own agency YouTube and FaceBook channels which will also be following the progress.

Are you scratching your head yet? LIVE?

As I was going through the sparse material available for me to read on the main NASA web site I was trying to figure out how I was going to was going to reword or reconvey some information for this article. The source material I researched ended up being 2 short sentences pulled from the NASA.gov web site (the public side weirdo) and I too noticed the confusing text announcing we have a date for Ingenuity’s first flight and apparently a date too, a LIVE one at that, for when said data will be forwarded (LIVE) to the eagerly awaiting scientists and armchair astrophysicists. Oh and let me point out that NASA has an absolute dearth of information on its web site. It’s just some of the area’s I read for research purposes might be of the static variety and I may have internalized the information previously or it’s updated data affecting my personal past articles. I visit the NASA site a lot looking for ideas on articles or for corrections or confirmations whatever the case might be and I have actually internalized a good chunk of that site; mostly the live research missions that are of interest to me plus whatever material I found as source material for my own articles. I just wanted to point out when I said ‘sparse’ above it’s relative.

Anyways, you might have thought the wording weird for the testing of Ingenuity. Then further weird wording about releasing the results the next day later during a livestream? Now, Mars is quite some distance from the Earrth so real time communications betweeen Mars and Earth is non-existent. The round trip time of any signal sent from Mars is approximately 22 minutes, or 11 minutes per each Mars/Earth leg of the trip. You might be thinking this must be the reason for compartmentalization and odd Sunday Monday workflow; they’re factoring in all the time delays. Yeah, that could be it.

So, the Ingenuity helicopter test will be performed this weekend and early next week we’ll get the results.

In Other NASA News

3-2-1 Launch – Three space travelers, including NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, launched on Friday, April 9, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station. During his mission, Vande Hei will work on hundreds of experiments to benefit life on Earth and learn more about living in space.

What’s Up – What are some skywatching highlights this month? In April, look for the rosy arch known as the Belt of Venus at sunset, and then find the constellation Leo overhead on April evenings.

Building Better Batteries – Although batteries are everywhere in everyday life, many still suffer breakdowns and failures. A new activity called SABERS is researching how to create a safer battery by using brand-new materials and construction methods