RED PLANET – NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first aircraft inhistory to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet.
The team of Ingenuity, which has 1.8-kilogram weight, at the agency’s JetPropulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed the feat afterreceiving data from the helicopter via NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.
The historic achievement will pave way for further space exploration.
“Ingenuity is the latest in a long and storied tradition of NASA projectsachieving a space exploration goal once thought impossible,” said actingNASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk in a statement, released by NASA.
“The X-15 was a pathfinder for the space shuttle. Mars Pathfinder and itsSojourner rover did the same for three generations of Mars rovers. We don’tknow exactly where Ingenuity will lead us, but today’s results indicate thesky – at least on Mars – may not be the limit.”
The solar-powered helicopter first became airborne at 3:34 a.m. EDT (12:34a.m. PDT) – 12:33 Local Mean Solar Time (Mars time) – a time the Ingenuityteam determined would have optimal energy and flight conditions.
Altimeter data indicate Ingenuity climbed to its prescribed maximumaltitude of 10 feet (3 meters) and maintained a stable hover for 30seconds. It then descended, touching back down on the surface of Mars afterlogging a total of 39.1 seconds of flight.
Ingenuity’s initial flight demonstration was autonomous – piloted byonboard guidance, navigation, and control systems running algorithmsdeveloped by the team at JPL.
Because data must be sent to and returned from the Red Planet over hundredsof millions of miles using orbiting satellites and NASA’s Deep SpaceNetwork, Ingenuity cannot be flown with a joystick, and its flight was notobservable from Earth in real time.
NASA Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen announced thename for the Martian airfield on which the flight took place.
As one of NASA’s technology demonstration projects, the 19.3-inch-tall(49-centimeter-tall) Ingenuity Mars Helicopter contains no scienceinstruments inside its tissue-box-size fuselage.
Instead, the 4-pound rotorcraft is intended to demonstrate whether futureexploration of the Red Planet could include an aerial perspective.
This first flight was full of unknowns. The Red Planet has a significantlylower gravity – one-third that of Earth’s – and an extremely thinatmosphere with only 1% the pressure at the surface compared to our planet.This means there are relatively few air molecules with which Ingenuity’stwo 4-foot-wide (1.2-meter-wide) rotor blades can interact to achieveflight.
Parked about 211 feet (64.3 meters) away at Van Zyl Overlook duringIngenuity’s historic first flight, the Perseverance rover not only acted asa communications relay between the helicopter and Earth, but alsochronicled the flight operations with its cameras. The pictures from therover’s Mastcam-Z and Navcam imagers will provide additional data on thehelicopter’s flight.