History was made on Monday as NASA’s helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity, performed the first ever flight of a powered aircraft on another planet.
To say it was no mean feat is an understatement — here’s a full explainer on why flying a helicopter on Mars is so damn hard. The moment also came after a painful wait for an all-too-familiar software update to the helicopter’s onboard computer last week, following an issue spotted in a rotor test.
But at precisely 3:34 a.m. ET on Monday, NASA successfully conducted a flight from the Martian surface, the first time a controlled, powered aircraft has done so on another planet. The images made it back to Earth at 6:46 a.m. ET.
NASA’s official Mars account shared a stunning image of Ingenuity hovering above the Martian surface, and confirmed “more test flights are planned for the coming days.”
Perseverance, the rover that allowed Ingenuity to hitch a ride to Mars, had a good view from where it was sitting nearby, capturing the moment when the helicopter hovered at an altitude of 10 feet (three metres) before descending, clocking a total 39.1 seconds of flight.
The four-pound (1.8-kilogram) craft was lifted by its four-foot-long, carbon fibre, counter-rotating rotors that spin at approximately 2,400 rpm.
SUCCESS!
Image: screenshot / nasa / youtube / mashable
As seen from the the Space Flight Operations Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, here’s the moment when Ingenuity took off, hovered, descended, then touched back down — all to furious applause from the team. It’s a really emotional moment, take a look:
“We’ve been talking for so long about our Wright brothers moment. And here it is,” said MiMi Aung, Mars Ingenuity helicopter project manager, following the news of the successful flight.
You can watch the whole thing on YouTube right here, skip to about 38 minutes for the gold:
“Ingenuity is the latest in a long and storied tradition of NASA projects achieving a space exploration goal once thought impossible,” said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk in a press statement. “The X-15 was a pathfinder for the space shuttle. Mars Pathfinder and its Sojourner rover did the same for three generations of Mars rovers. We don’t know exactly where Ingenuity will lead us, but today’s results indicate the sky — at least on Mars — may not be the limit.”
