Ingenuity in flight, as captured by the Mars Rover.
CNET
Vernuf, a NASA helicopter 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 of Ingenuity is an impressive milestone in space exploration, which paves the way for future missions to the red planet to exploit the sky. Learning to fly on Earth was difficult enough, but flying on Mars was a major engineering challenge. NASA has shown that it has fulfilled the task.
Ingenuity in flight.
NASA
“We’ve been talking for so long about our Wright brothers moment on Mars, and here it is,” he said. Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Project Manager MiMi Aung, after tearing up her contingency speech. “We can now say that humans flew a rotorcraft on another planet.”
Engineers on earth did not control the skill during his attempt. Instead, commands were loaded within seconds into the spacecraft that took it from pre-flight checks to powered flights. The rotor blades rotate to 2,537 rpm, about six times faster than a vessel on earth. Six seconds after takeoff, Ingenuity’s blades were able to generate lifts by cutting through the gentle atmosphere on the red planet.
Two images of Ingenuity were released during flight – one showing the shadow of the rotorcraft on the surface of Mars, and one captured from the side by the Mars rover.
You can watch NASA’s live stream here.
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 “switch to a 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 find PT 11:00, will likely see the first images and videos that are turned off for viewing. 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 historic 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 to 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. It may not have traveled quite the same distance as the Wright brothers, but Ingenuity has paved the way for making achievements elsewhere in the cosmos just as astounding.
Additional reporting by Katie Collins of CNET.
Follow CNET’s 2021 space calendar to stay up to date with all the latest space news this year. You can even add it to your own Google Calendar.