The NASA Ingenuity helicopter takes off on the first historic flight over Mars

Ingeniousness, a The NASA mini helicopter is no heavier than a 2-liter sodium bottle, took out the first motorized and controlled flight from another planet. The phase took place on Monday morning at 12:31, but only three hours later, NASA engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory received the first data from Mars.

The first flight is an impressive stage in space exploration, paving the way for future missions on the red planet to use the sky, exploring new regions of the surface and examining the dusty and dead plains of Mars.

Learning to fly on Earth was quite difficult, but flying to Mars was a great engineering challenge. The Martian atmosphere is only 1% as thick as Earth’s, so a standard flier would not cut it. NASA has now shown that it was up to the task.

“We’ve been talking about our Wright brothers’ time on Mars for so long, and here it is,” he said. Project Manager for the Mars MiMi Aung ingenuity helicopter, after breaking his emergency speech. “We can now say that humans flew in rotation on another planet.”

Ingeniousness was not controlled by engineers on Earth during its test. Instead, the commands were loaded onto the spacecraft, which took it from forward flight checks to motor flight in seconds. The rotor blades rotated up to 2,537 rpm, about six times faster than an Earth-based spacecraft. Six seconds after launch, the Ingenuity blades managed to generate the lift by slicing the fragile atmosphere on the red planet.

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Two ingeniously in-flight images were released – one showing the shadow of the rotor on the surface of Mars and one captured from the side by the rover on Mars.

You can watch NASA’s live stream below.

The flight attempt was delayed from the initial target date of April 11 to give NASA time to update the car software after a rotor rotation test ended too early. A problem with the “watchdog” timer prevented the helicopter from turning properly, but Ingenuity’s engineering team corrected the problem. The solution, they said, allows the helicopter to “switch to flight mode and prepare for takeoff about 85% of the time.”

It’s been nearly 120 years since Orville and Wilbur Wright took their experimental plane off the ground near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, documented in a famous black-and-white image of the flyer, taken just moments after it left. the ground.

An after-flight press briefing, scheduled to take place at 11 a.m. PT, will probably see the first disconnected images and videos for viewing. In particular, perseverance, The next generation of the NASA rover on Mars and the previous house for ingenuity, was parked just 200 meters away in a location known as Van Zyl Overlook. The rover probably captured the historic flight with its Navcam and Mastcam-Z images.

The ingenuity will also capture its own images, with black and white images used for navigation and color photographs sent back to JPL mission control months later. We’ll have those images on CNET as soon as they get back to Earth.

With a successful flight under the belt, NASA’s ingenuity team did not finish. A series of increasingly difficult flights will be attempted in the coming weeks, exceeding the limits of the small helicopter that could. A second flight was scheduled no earlier than April 22.

He may not have traveled the same distance as the Wright Kitty Hawk brothers, but ingenuity has paved the way for equally amazing deeds elsewhere in the cosmos.

Additional reporting by Katie Collins of CNET.

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