The ingenious helicopter manages to fly to Mars

NASA’s small ingenious helicopter made history today by making the first motorized and controlled flight of an aircraft to another planet, Mars.

JPL-NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory team in charge of monitoring the California mission reported live on data confirming that it took off, floated and landed again in the Jezero crater on Mars.

In addition, a black-and-white image of the helicopter in its shadow in the air was received and a small video recorded by the Perseverance rover, which remains a few meters away and serves as a communication link.

Confirmation that the small car (1.8 kilograms in weight) passed an incredibly difficult test with honors came at 10:46 GMT.

The solar-powered helicopter took off at 12:33 local average solar time on Mars (07:34 GMT), climbed to the prescribed maximum altitude of 3 meters, hovered for 30 seconds to descend and reach the surface again . A total of 39.1 seconds of flight.

The 278 million kilometers between the two planets make it impossible to get live data – the gap is about 15 minutes – so Ingenuity received instructions yesterday, but today had to manage the flight alone.

After receiving the data, the JPL-NASA team burst into cheers, applause and joy behind the masks.

Mimi Aung, project manager for Ingeniousness at JPL, said: “Now we can say that the human being managed to fly to another planet for the first time” and overwhelmed with emotion, she remembered the six years of work, ensuring at the same time that “If it weren’t for covid-19, I would hug” all his colleagues.

Flying to Mars is not an easy task. Although gravity is about a third of ours, the atmospheric pressure at the surface is only 1% of that of the Earth, so its blades had to rotate much faster, 2,537 rotations per minute.

The whole process was closely followed by the Perseverance rover, which took the helicopter to Mars in its “gut” and secured its communications. On his Twitter profile he wrote: “you can’t imagine what I just saw”, accompanied by a gif showing the flight, which he recorded in color.

JPL stressed in a tweet that “a motorized and controlled flight from the surface of another planet is possible. It takes a little ingenuity, perseverance and spirit for this opportunity to become a reality. “

It was the first, but not the last time I tried. His mission will last 30 suns (Martian days), during which time he could take the flight five more times and, as the Olympic motto says, will try to make it higher (up to five meters) and further .

The ingenuity has an air of fragility, with a wingspan of 1.2 meters, it consists of a small cube-shaped body, which houses sensors, cameras and batteries; two pairs of carbon fiber blades, placed one on top of the other, above it an antenna and a small solar panel, and four thin legs to sit on.

NASA broadcast live from the JLP room where the data was received. At 10.40 GMT, the reception engineer, identified as Michael, uttered a laconic and neutral “starting to see data” and soon: “seem nominal”.

They started a few minutes of tension as they entered and analyzed what was received from Mars: telemetry, battery, camera report, the engineer continued to say in the same tone that did not reveal an emotion.

Finally, NASA confirmed that “the data show that the helicopter had a first successful flight.”

The ingenuity does not carry any scientific tool, because it is a proof of the concept, a technological demonstration that it is possible to fly on the Red Planet, which will allow you to gain knowledge and experience for future missions that may have flying devices.

This company was compared by NASA to the feat done in 1903 by the Wright brothers, who made the first motor flight. In fact, the ingenuity carries a small piece of cloth from the wings of that plane under its rotors, and Aung still remembers it today.

NASA will offer a press conference throughout the day with more details about the helicopter flight, which wrote a page in the history of space, because as it was written on the wall of the JPL camera, they dared to do powerful things. .