NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity- 1st powered flight on another world.
A new world of flight opportunities just opened up.
The following written content by Mike Wall
The aerial exploration of Mars has begun.
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter lifted off on the Red Planet early this morning (April 19), performing the first-ever powered flight on a world beyond Earth.
The 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) chopper was scheduled to rise from the floor of Mars’ Jezero Crater at 12:31 a.m. EDT (0431 GMT) today, get a maximum of 10 feet (3 meters) above the red dirt and land after roughly 40 seconds aloft.
At about 6:15 a.m. EDT (1015 GMT), data came down from Ingenuity — via its much larger partner, NASA’s Perseverance rover — that the little rotorcraft had hit its marks. The first photo from Ingenuity showed the helicopter’s shadow on the Martian surface below, while Perseverance captured stunning video of the historic flight on Mars.
“Ingenuity has performed its first flight, the first flight of a powered aircraft on another planet!” Ingenuity’s chief pilot Håvard Grip said as he confirmed telemetry at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Brief though today’s flight was, it may well be game-changing, paving the way for extensive exploration by Martian aircraft down the road. Thanks to Ingenuity’s groundbreaking work, future Red Planet missions could commonly include choppers as scouts for rovers or data collectors in their own right, NASA officials have said.
The core team behind Ingenuity’s pioneering flight watched today’s Mars flight from a control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. They stood, threw up their hands and cheered as the flight’s success was confirmed.
MiMi Aung, Ingenuity’s project manager, triumphantly tore up her contingency speech (written in case of a failure) and hailed Ingenuity’s historic feat on Mars. Every planet, she’s said in the past, gets only one first flight.
“We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet!” Aung said as her team cheered. “We’ve been talking so long about our Wright brothers moment on Mars, and here it is.”
NASA named Ingenuity’s Martian airfield Wright Brothers Field after Orville and Wilbur Wright, who performed the first heavier-than-air flight on Earth in 1903. There’s also a piece of their Wright Flyer plane on Ingenuity to mark the event.
Because of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, much of Ingenuity’s mission team watched today’s event via a WebEx video conference. Aung sent them all remote hugs of success.
“You know I’m hugging you virtually,” Aung told her team. Read more from Space
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