NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter flew to Mars for the first time on Monday – and the Perseverance Rover captured the entire performance in sharp video.
The rover, which transported Ingenuity nearly 300 million miles to Mars, sits on a 211-foot view further and watches the historic flight take place at 3:34 a.m. ET.
In the video below, you can see that Ingenuity starts spinning its rotors, getting them at full speed (five times faster than an earth helicopter’s rotors) and then lifting itself 10 feet above the Martian surface. Then it floats, turns to perseverance and gently lowers itself back into the dust.
The whole flight took about 40 seconds.
“Goosebumps. It looks just like we tested,” Miui Aung, Ingenuity project manager, said when she presented the video during a press conference Monday after the flight. “Absolutely a beautiful flight. I do not think I can ever stop to look at it again and again.”
It was the first powered, controlled flight ever flown on another planet – NASA’s “Wright Brothers Moment”, as officials call it.
“Of everything we’ve seen so far, it’s a flawless flight,” Håvard Grip, the helicopter’s chief pilot, said in the briefing. “It was a gentle takeoff. At altitude it is pushed around a bit by the wind, but it holds the station really well and it puts the landing right on the place where it was supposed to go.
Ingenuity is a technology demonstration mission – it will do no science. However, now that NASA has shown that rotorcraft technology works, future space helicopters can explore ravines, caves and rocky fields that are too dangerous for robbers. Mars drones can even do exploration for future astronauts.
The first of up to five daring helicopter flights
An artist concept of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flying through the air of Mars.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Ingenuity has achieved its main goal – to prove that rotorcraft technology can work on Mars – but its mission is not over yet. Over the next two weeks, the spacecraft will attempt up to four flights and venture higher and further each time. The next flight, according to Aung, could take place as soon as Thursday.
“We want to push the rotorcraft to the extreme and really learn from it and get information,” she said.
NASA plans to turn on Perseverance’s microphone to include audio in future flight videos, though NASA engineers are not sure how that will sound. If all goes well, Ingenuity’s fifth and final venture could take it to 15 feet high over 980 feet of Martian soil.
But by that time, “it will be unlikely to land safely because we will go to unmarked areas,” Aung said in a preliminary briefing.
“If we have a bad landing, it will be the end of the mission,” she added. “The lifespan will be nicely determined by how well it lands.”
Once Ingenuity’s mission is over, the Perseverance Rover will continue on its own epic journey: searching for fossils of microbial alien life in the ancient river delta of the Jezero Crater.