Made coffee, propped my phone against a stack of books, and watched a rocket carry a helicopter to Mars on Thursday morning. That's not a sentence I expected to type when I started this blog back in 2011, but here we are.
Perseverance lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 7:50am Eastern on July 30th, riding a ULA Atlas V 541 (the big one, the one with the four solid rocket boosters strapped on so it looks like it's got training wheels made of fire). It's headed for Jezero Crater, and if everything goes right it lands there on February 18th, 2021. Seven months of cruising through space for a robot that's going to spend most of its time driving around at roughly the speed of a tired snail, drilling into rocks.
The rover itself is the headline, obviously. Bigger and heavier than Curiosity, better cameras, a drill that can core out rock samples and cache them in little tubes for a future mission to come pick up (yes, really, that's the plan, a whole separate mission just to go collect Perseverance's mail). But the part that actually got me leaning toward my laptop screen at work later that day, tab open in the corner where my boss couldn't quite see it, was Ingenuity.
Ingenuity is a helicopter. A four-pound helicopter, strapped to the belly of the rover, and at some point after landing it's going to detach, sit on the Martian surface by itself for a while, and then attempt to fly. Powered, controlled flight, on another planet, in an atmosphere that's about 1% as dense as ours. The engineers have said flat out this thing might just not work, that it's a technology demonstration riding along more or less for free, success not required for the main mission to be called a win. I love that framing. Somebody at JPL got budget approved for "let's just see if we can fly a little drone on Mars" and nobody made them promise it would work. Try explaining that pitch to a product manager here on Earth and watch the meeting go sideways.
I'll admit the livestream itself was a bit of a slog before liftoff — there's always forty-five minutes of hosts filling time, weather updates, some countdown hold for a boat that wandered into the range, the usual. I got into this stuff as a kid watching shuttle launches on a TV with an antenna that needed constant adjusting, and even then the pre-show dragged. Some things don't change no matter how good the graphics get.
What did strike me, watching this one, is how quiet the whole thing felt compared to everything else going on this year. No huge crowd at the Cape, coverage that felt almost like an afterthought next to the news cycle we've all been drowning in since March. Which is a shame, honestly, because a car-sized robot successfully launching toward another planet during a global pandemic is the kind of thing that in a normal year would've had wall-to-wall coverage for a week.
Also worth keeping an eye on this weekend: Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the two NASA astronauts who flew up on the SpaceX Crew Dragon back in May, are due to splash down off the Florida coast in the next couple of days, wrapping up the first crewed mission to fly on a commercial spacecraft. Different program, different company, same general vibe of "we're actually doing the space stuff again" that's been building all year. I've got no plans to get up early for that one, but I might.
Anyway. There's a helicopter on its way to Mars right now, folded up and waiting, and in about seven months we'll find out if it can fly. I'll take updates on that over just about anything else in tech news this week.