During the first flight, the creativity must rise to an altitude of approximately 10 meters in 3 seconds, hover for 30 seconds and then land in the same place in a controlled manner. To do this, the rotor must rotate 42 times per second.
Five trips
If that works, creativity will likely fly about five times in the coming weeks, each several hundred meters. This is expected to last about a month.
“These test flights do not directly teach us anything about Mars, other than that helicopter flights are possible in the air,” said Ter Braque. “It doesn’t collect data on Mars.” However, it is important that everything goes well. “Then maybe helicopters could be dispatched for the next mission, which, for example, could better map the surface of Mars.”
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