In a hardscrabble crater on Mars, a small helicopter with the brain of a smartphone is now a few days away from trying the first motor flight to another world. NASA hopes that its robotic helicopter, called the Ingenuity, will prove that motorized flight is possible in the dangerously thin Martian air and will help usher in a new era of planetary exploration in which drones play a vital role.
The ingenuity landed on Mars like a clandestine, bent over the bottom of NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on the red planet in February after a seven-month journey, 293 million miles from Earth. For the initial flight, the £ 85 million boat will simply rise about 10 feet above the surface and place – no higher than the edge of a regulated basketball hoop – before returning to surface. The entire flight should be completed in 90 seconds.
The short trip – one of five planned for a month that is expected to begin on April 11 or so – is a short jump through the measures of interplanetary travel. But agency officials said it would be a huge leap forward to explore Mars. In the future, they said, autonomous drones such as Ingeniousness could take to the skies to explore canyons, ice caps and other terrain inaccessible to rovers. If human explorers ever land on Mars, drones could serve as scouts and aerial sensors.
“We hope that ingenuity will allow us to expand and open up air mobility on Mars,” said Bob Balaram, chief project engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The flight of ingenuity, which is part of a larger mission to look for signs of past life on the red planet, is the latest in a series of notable moments on Mars this year.