NASA’s Mars helicopter ingenuity had just made aviation history, and his robot mate captured the whole thing on video.
Early this morning (April 19), Ingenuity announced the first powered flight on a world beyond the earth. The 4-lb. (1.8 kilogram) helicopter took off 10 meters (3 meters) above the floor of the Jezero crater, remained in the air of Mars for 39 seconds and came down for an exact landing at its take-off location.
And we have high-definition documentation of this worldly Wright Brothers moment thanks to NASA Perseverance, which recorded the flight from 230 feet (70 meters) with its powerful Mastcam-Z camera system.
“Absolutely beautiful flight!” MiMi Aung, project manager of Ingenuity, said this during a press conference providing details about the particular flight and released Perseverance’s video.
“I do not think I can ever stop looking again and again,” added Aung, who is based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.
Video: Watch Ingenuity’s first flight on Mars
A helicopter on Mars
Ingenuity ended up with perseverance deployed on February 18 in Jezero inside and out of the Rover’s belly earlier this month. The solar-powered rotor craft has two cameras, but no scientific instruments. It is a technology demonstration designed to indicate that powered flights on Mars are possible, with an atmosphere only 1% as thick as the Earth at sea level.
Perseverance’s most important job is to look for signs of antiquity life on mars and cache monsters and cache them for future return to Earth, but the rover will not start work seriously until Ingenuity’s month-long flight campaign comes to an end. Perseverance documents the campaign and supports it in important ways. For example, all communications to and from the solar hood are routed through the rover.
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Aung and her colleagues plan to fly four more flights in the two weeks they remain in the campaign, with number two tentatively on Thursday (April 19). (The clock started ticking when Ingenuity deployed from Perseverance, and the helicopter’s first flight was delayed by about a week as the team worked to resolve a software issue.)
Those flights will become increasingly complicated and ambitious, with the team flying Ingenuity higher, farther and faster as time goes on.
“It’s a pathfinder,” Aung said. “We really want to know what the limits are, and therefore we will push the limits very deliberately.”
She said she would like Ingenuity to move about 600 meters downhill on its fifth and final flight, provided the helicopter performs well on types two to four. It is unclear where Ingenuity will go with its last ramp, but it is possible that the long flight will help plan Perseverance’s routes; Aung said she is agnostic about flight direction and will ask the rover team if they have any preferences.
Related: How NASA’s Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Can Fly on the Red Planet
The future of flying from outside the planet
Such reconnaissance work, if it did occur, would serve as an appropriate bridge to the future that helps Ingenuity unlock – a future in which Mars’ aerial reconnaissance is common, and helicopters perform a variety of important tasks on the Red Planet.
“What the Ingenuity team did gives us the third dimension,” JPL director Mike Watkins said during today’s press conference.
“They have now freed us forever from the surface in planetary exploration, so that we can now, of course, make a combination of riding on the surface and stabbing the surface and exploring and even conducting scientific experiments in inaccessible places for ‘ a rover, “he added. “And I think that’s exactly the way we are building the future.”
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.