- Jonathan Amos
- Scientific correspondent, BBC
Image source, NASA / JPL-CALTECH
This is what the shadow of Ingenuity on Mars looks like.
“It is real!” Exclaimed MiMi Aung, the leader of the Ingenuity project, the helicopter that performed the first controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet.
Excited, Aung broke the speech she had prepared in case the mission failed. “Now we can say that people flew in a helicopter to another planet,” he said from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
His enthusiasm comes from the fact that the small unmanned aircraft of NASA overflown successfully the surface of Mars, as reported on Monday by the space agency.
Ingeniousness reached Mars in the rover’s belly Perseverance, which landed in the red planet Jezero crater in February.
The helicopter flight lasted less than a minute, but NASA has announced that there will be more exploratory flights in the coming days.
The little plane is expected it flies higher and farther, while engineers test the device’s technology.
Aung compared the Ingenuity flight to Mars with the first flight The Wright brothers.
In 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first flight of a controlled and motorized aircraft here on Earth.
In fact, the ingenuity wears a small fabric cutout on one of the wings of Flyer 1, the plane that made that historic flight over Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, more than 117 years ago.
Fly to Mars
The drone rose about ten meters, made a few turns and drifts, then landed.
All in all, they were close 40 seconds of flight, from takeoff to landing.
And it may not seem like much, but flying to Mars is not easy.
Its atmosphere is very thin, it has only 1% of the density of the Earth.
Image source, Godmother
The ingenuity reached Mars inside the Perseverance vehicle.
That makes propellers difficult “Grab” the air towards push the appliance up.
The low weight of Mars helps, but even so, it takes a lot of work to get off the ground.
For this reason, ingenuity was built to be extremely light, with the ability to move its blades quickly, over 2,500 rotations per minute.
Independent
The ship flew autonomously.
Thus, Mars is almost 300 million kilometers from Earth the radio signals last a few minutes in crossing space.
This makes using Earth commands simple impossible.
Image source, NASA / JPL-CALTECH
Perseverance took pictures of ingenuity.
He has ingenuity two rooms on board. One in black and white facing the ground, used for navigation; and a high-resolution, horizontally oriented color.
In an image from the navigation camera that the drone sent to Earth, you can see it his shadow when you land.
In turn, Perseverance managed to record a few short videos of the flight, 65 meters away.
More images are expected to arrive in the next one longer videos.
NASA has announced that the “runway” at Jezero, where Perseverance left ingenuity, will be known by now “Wright Brothers Field.”
Image source, GODMOTHER
The ingenuity flew for less than a minute.
Tool for the future
After the successful inaugural flight of ingenuity, four more flights will be tried in the coming days.
In each of them is to be expected move on.
NASA hopes that these types of flights can become one ordinary way of exploration other planets in the future.
Drones could be used to explore a planet before exploration vehicles are dispatched, or even those astronaut that he expects to one day reach Mars.
Image source, NASA / JPL-CALTECH
The ingenuity is expected to make several flights over Mars
“It’s like having an instrument we haven’t been able to use before, but which is now available for all of our missions to Mars …open new doorsSaid Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s scientific director.
“We will be able to explore areas where we cannot use a rover. For example, some crater walls.”
NASA has already approved a helicopter mission to Titan, Saturn’s big moon.
Dragonfly, as the mission is known, should reach Titan in the mid-2030s.
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