Ingeniousness in flight, captured by Mars Rover.
CNET
Ingeniousness, a The NASA 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 of ingenuity is an impressive stage in space exploration, paving the way for future missions to the red planet to use the sky. Learning to fly on Earth was difficult enough, but flying to Mars was a great engineering challenge. NASA said it was up to the task.
Ingeniousness in flight.
GODMOTHER
“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 lift by slicing through the fragile atmosphere of the red planet.
Two images with Ingeniousness in Flight were released – one showing the shadow of the rotor on the surface of Mars and one captured from the side by the Mars rover.
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 it 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.”
Nearly 120 years have passed 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 butterfly, taken just moments after it left. the ground.
An after-flight press briefing, scheduled to take place at 11 a.m. PT, you will probably see the first images and videos linked below 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 will have these images on CNET as soon as they return 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. He may not have traveled the same distance as the Wright brothers, but ingenuity opened the way to accomplish equally amazing deeds elsewhere in the cosmos.
Additional reporting by Katie Collins of CNET.
Follow CNET’s 2021 Space Calendar to stay up to date with all the latest space news this year. You can even add it to your own Google Calendar.