SpaceX this weekend will attempt the first U.S.

After proving powered, controlled flight is possible on the Red Planet, NASA's Mars Ingenuity helicopter has new orders: scout ahead of the Perseverance rover to assist in its search for past signs of microbial life.

The next phase extends the rotocraft's mission beyond the original month-long technology demonstration. Now, the goal is to assess how well flyers can help future exploration of Mars and other worlds.

"We're going to gather information on the operational support capability of the helicopter while Perseverance focuses on its science mission," Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, told reporters Friday.

A mission to explore energy transport in space using a NASA suborbital sounding rocket is scheduled to be conducted the evening of May 7 from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Launch for the mission is scheduled for 7:58 p.m. EDT with a 40-minute launch window, Friday, May 7, 2021, on a NASA Black Brant XII sounding rocket. Backup launch days run through May 16. The launch may be visible in much of the eastern United States and Bermuda.

The mission, called the KiNETic-scale energy and momentum transport eXperiment, or KiNet-X, is designed to study a very fundamental problem in space plasmas, namely, how are energy and momentum transported between different regions of space that are magnetically connected?

For example, auroras. Auroras are formed when particles in the Earth's near-space environment interact with the atmosphere.

"The electrons in Earth's space environment and in the solar wind have relatively low energies. Yet the aurora is generated by very high energy electrons.