The red planet rotorcraft will extend its range, speed, and flight duration on Flight Four.

Now that NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has accomplished the goal of achieving powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on the red planet, and with data from its most recent flight test, on April 25, the technology demonstration project has met or surpassed all of its technical objectives. The Ingenuity team now will push its performance envelope on Mars.

The fourth Ingenuity flight from "Wright Brothers Field," the name for the Martian airfield on which the flight took place, is scheduled to take off Thursday, April 29, at 10:12 a.m.

A suite of scientific balloons is about to lift off from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility's field site in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, carrying instruments that will help scientists understand the connection between the Sun and Earth.

The Sun sizzles at the center of our solar system 93 million miles away, but its influence doesn't end there. It exhales the solar wind, a continuous stream of charged particles that whisks past Earth and continues for more than 4 billion miles. Sudden bursts in the solar wind can trigger beautiful auroras on Earth, but can also disrupt radio and GPS signals, threaten our satellites, and pose a risk to electrical power grids at the surface.

For the first few months of 2021, the Martian atmosphere was buzzing with new visitors from Earth. First, it was the UAE Space Agency's Hope probe, followed by the Chinese Tianwen-1 entering orbit.

More recently Nasa landed the biggest-ever rover on Mars and its companion, an ingenious helicopter, both of which have been setting new milestones since.

The next visitor to the planet will be Tianwen-1 mission's lander, which will attempt to reach the surface of the Mars in mid-May. To enter the Martian atmosphere, it will use a slightly different technique to previous missions.

Landing on Mars is notoriously dangerous—more missions have failed than succeeded. A successful Mars landing requires entering the atmosphere at very high speeds, then slowing the spacecraft down just the right way as it approaches its landing location.

This phase of the mission, known as entry-descent-landing, is the most critical.

As anyone who has ever tried to clean a home knows, ridding yourself of dust is a Sisyphean effort. No surface stays free of it for long. It turns out that space is somewhat similar. Space is filled with interplanetary dust, which the Earth constantly collects as it plods around the sun—in orbit, in the atmosphere, and if it's large enough, on the ground as micrometeorites.

While specimens may not be large, it turns out such dust particles are reforming scientists' conception of asteroids and comets and are enough to reconstruct entire scenes in the history of the solar system.

NASA's Mars Ingenuity helicopter missed its fourth scheduled flight on Thursday, with the space agency blaming a software glitch and vowing to try again the next day.

"The helicopter is safe and in good health," said a statement, adding the rotorcraft had failed to transition to "flight mode."

The team plans to attempt the flight once more on Friday at 10:46 am Eastern Time (1446 GMT) with data expected back at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory around three hours later.

The software issue is thought to be the same one that delayed Ingenuity's maiden voyage, the first powered flight on another planet. Initially scheduled for April 11, the historic feat occurred April 19.