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by oseityphelysiol 1900 days ago
Wow, I didn’t think the rover would have moved as much as it did already. Expected to see months of checkups, nice to see them progressing fast. Is there an approximate schedule of the first flight?
2 comments

Wait I must have been living under a rock, are they going to fly a helicopter on Mars??! How will they control it? Latency issues and all.
You can find its Wikipedia article at [0]. The answer is that it is (semi-)autonomous! [1] I think it is going to get directions where to go and will do the rest itself. Its processor is not hardened against radiation which most likely will make it rather short-lived but thereby they could use a much more powerful processor than otherwise possible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)

[1] It has to be as even under ideal conditions, Mars and Earth are never closer than ~55 million kilometers. This means the minimum roundtrip time is about six minutes at the speed of light.

It's a drone helicopter, it can fly itself.
Current target seems to be "no earlier than April 11"