Get ready for the first flight of NASA’s Mars helicopter

Before heading off to search for signs of long ago Martian microbes, NASA’s Perseverance rover will first undertake what may be the most technologically exciting part of its mission: flying a helicopter.

Packed under the belly of Perseverance, a car-size robotic vehicle that landed on Mars last month, is Ingenuity, a 4-pound minihelicopter intended to demonstrate that flying on another planet is possible.

NASA officials announced on Tuesday that they had selected the site for this demonstration of extraterrestrial hovering — just north of where it landed.

“That area naturally needs to be flat,” Havard Grip, the NASA engineer who serves as the chief pilot for Ingenuity’s flights, said during a news conference Tuesday, “and it needs to have few obstacles — rocks and the like — that could pose a danger to the helicopter on landing.”