NASA Ingenuity helicopter departs on the first historic flight over Mars

Ingenuity takes flight for the first time.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

Vernuf, a NASA mini helicopter is no heavier than a 2 liter bottle of soda, set off the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. The performance took place at 00:31 PT on Monday morning, but only three hours later NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory received the first data from Mars.

The first flight is an impressive milestone in space exploration, which paves the way for future missions on the red planet to exploit the sky, explore new regions of the surface and explore Mars’ dusty, dead plains.

Learning to fly on Earth was difficult enough, but flying on Mars was a major engineering challenge. Mars’ atmosphere is only 1% as thick as Earth’s, so a standard plane would not cut it. NASA has now shown that it has fulfilled the task.

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Ingenuity’s shadow on the Martian surface. You can only leave the tracks that the Perseverance Rover left behind.

NASA

“We’ve been talking for so long about our Wright brothers moment on Mars, and here it is,” he said. Engineers Mars Helicopter Project Manager MiMi Aung, after tearing up her contingency speech. “We can now say that humans flew with a rotorcraft on another planet.”

Engineers on earth did not control engineers during his effort. Instead, commands were loaded within seconds into the spacecraft that took it from pre-flight checks to motor flight. The rotor blades rotated to 2,537 rpm, about six times faster than an earth vessel. Six seconds after takeoff, Ingenuity’s blades were able to generate lifts by cutting through the gentle atmosphere on the red planet.


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Watch NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter fly to Mars


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Two images were released by Ingenuity during the flight – one showing the shadow of the rotorcraft on the surface of Mars, and one captured by the Mars rover from the side.

You can watch NASA’s livestream again below.

The flight attempt was delayed from the original target date of 11 April NASA time to update machine software after a rotation test of the rotors ended too early. A problem with the “watchdog” timer prevented the helicopter from turning right, but Ingenuity’s engineering team fixed the problem. The solution, according to them, makes it possible for the helicopter to ” go into flight mode and prepare about 85% of the time for takeoff. ”

It’s almost 120 years since Orville and Wilbur Wright got their experimental plane off the ground near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, documented in a famous black-and-white image of the leaflet taken moments after it left the ground.

A press briefing after the flight, scheduled to take place at 11:00 PT, will likely see the first images and videos that are turned off. In particular, perseverance, NASA’s next generation Mars Rover and previous home for Ingenuity, was stationed just 200 meters away at a place known as Van Zyl Overlook. The rover probably captured the history flight with its Navcam and Mastcam-Z imagery.

Ingenuity also cropped its own images with black-and-white images used to navigate and later radiate photos back onto JPL’s mission control. We’ll have those images on CNET as soon as it’s down to earth again.

With one successful flight under control, NASA’s Ingenuity team is not done. A series of increasingly difficult flights will be attempted in the coming weeks, pushing the limits of the small helicopter. A second flight is scheduled for no earlier than April 22nd.

It may not have traveled quite the same distance as the Wright brothers Kitty Hawk, but Ingenuity has paved the way for achievements elsewhere in the cosmos.

Additional reporting by Katie Collins of CNET.

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