NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter took this shot as it hovered over the Martian surface on April 19, 2021.
NASA / JPL-CalTech
Mankind’s first flight to another planet was short, but it was super sweet. On Monday, NASA shared the full video and sent additional photos from the Perseverance on Mars of his accomplice, a small helicopter called Ingenuity, in action.
“This is truly a moment of Wright Brothers,” Steve Jurczyk, acting NASA administrator, said in a news release Monday.
The solar plane, 1.8 kilograms (4 pounds) lifted from the floor of the Jezero crater at 12:34 PT (3:34 ET), climbed to a height of 10 feet (3 meters), made a 96-degree turn in the air, and held steady for 30 seconds. It then touches on almost exactly the same spot after 39 seconds of flight.
The whole case is captured in the video above which was recorded in a resolution of 1,280×720 by the Mastcam-Z camera on Perseverance from the lookout point of the rover, about 648 meters away.
“It’s being pushed around a bit in the wind,” explains Håvard Grip, chief pilot of Ingenuity.
A downward, black-and-white navigation camera on Ingenuity also captured some images during the flight.
Grip has announced that the International Civil Aviation Organization Ingenuity has awarded an official indicator, IGY, and the flight venue has the ceremonial designation JZRO for the Jezero crater.
NASA, meanwhile, has named the location of Ingenuity’s first flight Wright Brothers Field, in honor of the iconic American aviation pioneers.
Ingenuity undertook the long journey to Mars in the belly of perseverance, and it was sank on the Martian surface on April 3, a few weeks after the landing of the rover on 18 February.
Monday’s short glide is expected to be the first of at least a handful of flight attempts for the small machete.
Engineering Project Manager MiMi Aung says she hopes to use about four more flights in the two weeks in the experimental flight window. She said the flights will be aimed at expanding the machine’s ability to go further and faster.
“We will push the envelope,” Aung said, adding that her team will continue to review all data before the next flight attempt, but that the current target for Ingenuity’s next test is this Thursday.
Asked if Ingenuity’s final fate might be an accident, she replied: “Ultimately, we expect the helicopter to reach its limit.”
Stay tuned. Things are only starting to get hot on the frozen red planet now that humanity’s space robots are no longer grounded.
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