Out of the belly of the Beast, as it were.
Quite looking forward to this experiment. Hopefully the little critter lasts longer than the design spec, as most of its compadres have.
Ingenuity, NASA’s dual-rotor drone right now strapped to the belly of the Perseverance rover on Mars, is set to perform humankind's first-ever powered aircraft flight on another planet within the coming weeks. And during this historic trip, fingers crossed, the solar-powered helicopter gizmo will aptly enough carry with it a …
It probably will not. It can only talk to the DSN via Perseverance, and at some point Perseverance needs to drive away to get on with its main mission, at which point Ingenuity is effectively dead. Once it's proved it works then it's done its job and every sol Perseverance waits for it after that is one less sol doing what it's meant to be doing.
There have been suggestions (not as far as I know from NASA though, although they probably would not say anyway) that Ingenuity could tag along for a while: I suspect that the comms & other overhead of having it do that is a cost people don't want to pay though. Also that increases the chance of something bad happening which causes it to hit Perseverance, which would be Very Bad Indeed.
So, look at that: five drive-by downvotes and no upvotes for saying something which is very well known and entirely uncontroversial to anyone who has been following the mission in any detail. I don't know what that says, but it's nothing good.
(I don't care about the imaginary internet points: I'd make this comment if it was someone else's correct answer.)
However, NASA is well known for over-engineering systems that continue to work well past their sell-by date ... and then managing to beg/steal/borrow enough budget to continue doing science well after the planned end of mission. Whether or not it happens in this case is anyone's guess. If I were a betting man (I'm not), my money would be on NASA making several dozen more flights than originally planned. If it still works, it is a truly unique opportunity, so why not?
No, thwere isn't a bandwidth issue, and no, it's not going to damage the rover unless some dumb-ass manages to do a fly-by and screws the pre-programmed flight path up ... which is unlikely to say the least. MarsLab doesn't hire cowboys.
It's certainly about as technically relevant (wright flyer was a technological dead-end which even the Wrights quickly abandoned as it was too dangerous to fly and the "competing" designs were airborne for several weeks before news that the Wrights had beaten them into the air filtered through(*))
It would be on par with taking an original AT&T point contact transistor along as a "historical sample" when the entire semiconductor industry is based on parallel-developed philips thin film technology that was demonstrated a few weeeks after the AT&T effort
Whmsy? Ego? Nostalgia? Yes
Spiritual ancestor of the helicoptor on Mars? No
(*) I'm going to leave Santos and Pierce on the wayside here, because despite claims there's simply not enough evidence they flew first
Wright brothers’ Wright Flyer, which is recognized as Earth's first successful heavier-than-air powered aircraft.
Definitively not! The fist heavier-than-air powered aircraft that was able to fly was Clement Ader's Eole, 13 years before Wright's plane.
Yup. There's a LOT of quibbling to be had regarding the early days of aviation history, but there was definitely a powered heavier-than air craft before the Wrights efforts - but it was NOT capable of, or intended to, carry a human, and there were quite a few who achieved gliding manned flight before the Wrights did (notably Lilienthal) , indeed the Wrights were inspired by what they'd heard of others achievements, and built upon them with their own experimentation. People had been looking into gliding flight for a century or so beforehand.
The Wrights achievement was a great step forward, and deserves its place in history. I just wish that some of the other aviation pioneers were better known, though!