GODMOTHER Helicopter Mars Ingeniousness he just made aviation history, and his robotic friend captured everything on the video.
Early this morning (April 19), Ingeniousness became the first motor flight to a world beyond Earth. The 4-lb (1.8 kilograms) helicopter rose 10 meters (3 meters) above the floor of Jezero Crater, remained in the thin air of Mars for 39 seconds and descended for a precise landing at its takeoff location.
And we have high-definition documentation of this Wright Brothers moment from another world thanks to NASA Rover perseverance, which recorded the flight from 70 meters away using its powerful Mastcam-Z camera system.
“Absolutely beautiful flight!” The ingenuity project manager, MiMi Aung, said today during a press conference that he provided details about the reference flight and revealed the Perseverance video.
“I don’t think I can ever stop watching him again and again,” added Aung, who is based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.
Video: Watch Ingenuity’s first flight to Mars
A helicopter on Mars
Ingenuity landed with perseverance inside Jezero on February 18 and unfolded from the belly of the rover earlier this month. The solar-powered rotor device carries two chambers, but has no scientific instruments. It is a technological demonstration designed to show that motor flight is possible on Mars, which has an atmosphere only 1% as thick as that of Earth at sea level.
The main services of perseverance are to hunt for signs of the old life on Mars and collect and cache samples for future return to Earth, but the rover won’t start that work seriously until Ingenuity’s one-month flight campaign is over. Perseverance documents that campaign and supports it in crucial ways. For example, all communications to and from the solar-powered helicopter are routed through the rover.
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Aung and her colleagues plan to make four more flights in the remaining two weeks of the campaign, with number two scheduled for Thursday (April 19). (The clock began to tick when ingenuity set in from Perseverance, and the helicopter’s first flight was delayed by about a week as a team. worked to solve a software problem.)
These flights will become more and more complex and ambitious, with the team flying ingeniously higher, farther and faster as time goes on.
“This is a search path,” Aung said. “We really want to know what the limits are, so we will push the limits very deliberately.”
She said she would like the ingenuity to travel about 600 meters down her fifth and final flight, provided the helicopter performed well at exits two through four. It is not clear where the ingenuity will go at its last takeoff, but it is possible that the long flight will help plan the itinerant routes of Perseverance; Aung said she is agnostic about the direction of the flight and will ask the rover team if she has preferences.
Related: How the ingenuity of NASA’s Mars helicopter can fly on the red planet
The future of flying off the planet
Such research, if it really happens, would serve as a suitable bridge for the future that ingenuity helps to unlock – a future in which aerial exploration of Mars is common and helicopters meet a variety of important tasks on the red planet.
“What the ingenuity team did gave us a third dimension,” JPL director Mike Watkins told a news conference today.
“They have freed us from the surface now forever in planetary exploration, so that we can now make a combination, of course, to lead to the surface and take surface samples and to do recognition and even scientific experimentation in inaccessible places. for a rover, “he added.” And I think that’s exactly how we build the future. “
Mike Wall is the author of “There“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.