NASA’s ingenious helicopter flew to Mars for the first time on Monday – and the Perseverance rover captured the whole story in a clear video.
The rover, which transported the ingenuity almost 300 million miles to Mars, perched on a 211-meter view and watched the historic flight that took place at 3:34 a.m. ET.
In the video below, you can see the ingenuity of starting to rotate its rotors, raising them to maximum speed (five times faster than the rotors of an Earth helicopter), then rising 10 feet above the Martian surface. After that, it glides, pivots toward Perseverance, and descends slightly back into the dust.
The entire flight lasted about 40 seconds.
“Goosebumps. It looks exactly as we tested it,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity project manager, as he presented the video at a post-flight press conference on Monday. “Absolutely nice flight. I don’t think I can ever stop watching him again and again.”
This was the first motorized and controlled flight ever made to another planet – NASA’s “Wright Brothers moment,” as agency officials call it.
“From everything I’ve seen so far, it’s been a flawless flight,” Håvard Grip, the helicopter’s chief pilot, said in a briefing. “It was a light takeoff. At altitude, it’s pushed a little bit by the wind, but it really holds up very well at the station and blocked the landing right where it was supposed to go.”
Ingenuity is a demonstration mission of technology – it will not lead any science. However, now that NASA has demonstrated that rotorcraft technology works, future space helicopters could explore canyons, caves and rocky fields, which are too dangerous for rovers. The drones on Mars could even recognize future astronauts.
The first of up to 5 daring helicopter flights
An artist’s concept of NASA’s Mars ingenious helicopter flying through the Martian sky.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The 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 space drone will attempt four more flights, each time venturing higher and farther. The next flight could come immediately after Thursday, according to Aung.
“We really want to push rotorcraft to the limit and really learn and learn from it,” she said.
NASA plans to power the Perseverance microphone to include sound in future flight videos, although NASA engineers are not sure how it will sound. If all goes well, Ingenuity’s fifth and final adventure could take it up to 15 feet above 980 feet of Martian terrain.
However, until then, “it would be unlikely to land safely, because we will start going to unexplored areas,” Aung said in a preliminary briefing.
“If we have a bad landing, this will be the end of the mission,” she added. “Life expectancy will be determined by how well it lands, pretty much.”
Once the mission of ingenuity is over, the Perseverance rover will continue its own epic journey: searching for fossils of microbial extraterrestrial life in the ancient delta of the Jezero Crater River.