NASA’s helicopter has made a debut test flight to Mars, engineers confirmed Monday morning. The small spacecraft rose 10 feet from the Martian surface for about 40 seconds, marking the first motorized flight to another world. The historical demonstration opens up tempting possibilities for a new way of traveling the planet that could send the future of rotorcraft far beyond the traditional radius of rovers.
The four-pound ingenious helicopter lifted its tissue-sized body around noon on Mars (around 3:30 AM ET), rotating its double rotor blades to get its first flight into the ultra-thin atmosphere of Mars. to Mars faster than 2,500 RPM – much faster than the approximately 500 RPM needed to fly on Earth. The rotorcraft arrived on the Red Planet on February 18, hanging from the bottom of NASA’s Perseverance rover. It was launched from Perseverance a month later, on April 4, starting with a 31-day clock to perform five flight tests.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory burst into tears after confirming that Ingenuity’s flight attempt was a success. “Confirmed that ingenuity made its first flight with an aircraft propelled to another planet,” said downlink engineer Michael Starch. “We can now say that human beings flew with a rotation to another planet,” Ingenuity project manager MiMi Aung told NASA engineers in control of the mission after confirming the helicopter’s successful flight test.
“It simply came to our notice then. I couldn’t be more proud, “Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, wrote on Twitter. After successful confirmation, Zurbuchen said that NASA named the Ingenuity Wright Brothers Field flying area as a tribute to the Wright Brothers’ revolutionary flight in 1903 and “in recognition of the ingenuity and innovation that continues to propel exploration.” The helicopter carries on its body a piece the size of a postcard of the Wright brothers’ iconic plane.
A black-and-white image of Ingenuity’s downward-facing navigation camera was the first visual confirmation of the “copter’s” flight, showing the shadow of the experimental ship about 10 meters above the surface. A few minutes after confirmation, a sequence of images made by Perseverance, watching from about 30 meters away, reached the control of the mission and set in motion the Ingenuity flight for the first time.
The flight has been delayed several times since April 11, with a delay last week that forced engineers to reload all of Ingenuity’s flight software after facing a problem during pre-flight tests. The helicopter has a runway-shaped flight zone on the Jezero crater of Mars, the site of a bed of dry lake that Perseverance will look for signs of past microbial life.
The main mission of ingenuity is to demonstrate flight, without the goal of exploring Mars or conducting scientific experiments. These jobs are reserved for Perseverance, whose main life-hunting mission involves caching samples of Martian soil that a future rover will send back to Earth as early as 2031. The rover was tracking the Ingenuity flight from a distance of about 30 meters away, with two of the board rooms. These images, scientists say, will arrive in the coming days.
Developing…