In-flight ingenuity, as captured by the Mars Rover.
CNET
Ingenuity, a NASA helicopter no heavier than a 2 liter bottle of soda, performed the first powered controlled flight on another planet. The feat occurred Monday morning at 12:31 p.m. PT, but it wasn’t until more than three hours later that NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory received the first data from Mars.
Ingenuity’s maiden flight is an impressive milestone in space exploration, paving the way for future missions to the red planet to use the skies. Learning to fly on Earth was difficult enough, but flying on Mars was a major technical challenge. NASA showed it was up to the task.
Ingenuity on the fly.
NASA
“We’ve been talking about our brothers Wright’s moment on Mars for so long, and here it is,” he said. Ingenuity Project Manager for Mars helicopters MiMi Aung, after tearing up her unforeseen speech. “We can now say that people have flown a helicopter to another planet.”
Ingenuity was not checked by engineers on Earth in its attempt. Instead, commands were uploaded to the spacecraft that took it from preflight checks to powered flights in seconds. The rotor blades spun at 2537 rpm, about six times faster than any vessel on Earth. Six seconds after power up, Ingenuity’s blades were able to generate lift by cutting through the rarefied atmosphere on the red planet.
Two images of Ingenuity in flight were released: one with the shadow of the rotorcraft on the surface of Mars and one captured from the side by the Mars rover.
You can rewatch NASA’s live stream below.
The flight attempt had been delayed from the original target date of April 11 to surrender NASA time to update the machine’s software ended prematurely after a spin test of the rotors. A problem with the watchdog timer prevented the helicopter from turning properly, but the Ingenuity engineering team has fixed the problem. The solution, they said, allows the helicopter to “switch to flight mode and prepare for takeoff about 85% of the time.”
It’s been nearly 120 years since Orville and Wilbur Wright got their experimental plane off the ground at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, documented in a famous black and white photo of the flyer taken just after it left the ground.
A post-flight press briefing, scheduled at 11 a.m.PT, will likely see the first images and videos that have been downloaded for viewing. In particular perseverance, NASA’s next-gen Mars rover and the previous home for Ingenuity, was stationed just 60 meters away at a location known as Van Zyl Overlook. The rover likely captured the historic flight with its Navcam and Mastcam-Z imagers.
Ingenuity will have taken its own images too, with black and white images used for navigation and color photos beamed back to JPL’s mission control later on Monday. We’ll have those images on CNET as soon as they get back to Earth.
With a successful flight under its belt, NASA’s Ingenuity team isn’t done yet. A series of increasingly difficult flights will be attempted in the coming weeks, pushing the limits of the small helicopter that could do that. It may not have traveled the same distance as the Wright brothers, but Ingenuity has opened a path to deliver performances just as stunning elsewhere in the cosmos.
Additional reporting by CNET’s Katie Collins.
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