Ingenuity captured this Image of its shadow on Mar's surface. (Image Credit: NASA)
Aerial exploration of Mars is officially underway! On April 19th, NASA lifted off its Ingenuity helicopter from Mars, marking the first performance of a powered, controlled flight on another planet. The 1.8-kg rotorcraft ascended 3 meters above the Jezero Crater surface and stayed overhead for 30 seconds before landing. It had a total flight time of 39.1 seconds. At 6:15 a.m. EDT, NASA received data from a satellite confirming that Ingenuity reached its target. NASA plans to carry out more flights in the next few days. Ingenuity is expected to soar higher and further to test the technology's limits.
MiMi Aung, Ingenuity's project manager, tore up the contingency speech, which was written in case of failure, while her team cheered. "We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet!" Aung said. "We've been talking so long about our Wright brothers' moment on Mars, and here it is."
Ingenuity's airfield on Mars was named the Wright Brothers Field after Orville and Wilbur Wright, who conducted the first controlled air flight on Earth in 1903. Additionally, there is a piece from one of the Flyer 1 wings aboard Ingenuity. Flyer 1 is the aircraft that took the historic flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, over 117 years ago.
Taking flight on the Martian planet is not an easy task. The extremely thin atmosphere is only 1% as dense as Earth's at sea level. This means that there's very little air for the rotorcraft's blades to push against, so it can't gain much lift. Mars' lower gravitational pull, which is 38% as strong as Earth's, helps with that, but it takes a lot of effort to lift off.
That's why Ingenuity is very lightweight. It runs on 350 watts of power to quickly rotate the blades at over 2,500 revolutions per minute for this flight. The drone doesn't rely on a joystick. Instead, it's autonomously controlled since it takes minutes for radio signals to reach Mars from Earth.
Image showing both the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter. (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
There are two cameras mounted on Ingenuity. One of them is a black-and-white camera that's aimed toward the surface for navigational purposes. The other is a high-resolution color camera that's focused on the horizon. A navigation image showed the helicopter's shadow on the crater's surface as it landed. More images are expected to be taken over the next day. Meanwhile, Perseverance captured a short video of the flight from 64.3 meters away.
Another four flights are planned. The helicopter could reach a higher ascent on the second and third flight, getting up to 5m off the surface and moving 50 meters downrange. If those two go well, flights four and five should be adventurous.
Eventually, the demonstration could alter how we explore other worlds. Drones can be used to investigate certain areas for rovers and astronauts when they reach Mars. A NASA-approved helicopter mission, called Dragonfly, is expected to land on Titan in the mid-2030s.
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