Ingenuity is taking off for the first time.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Ingenuity, a NASA mini 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.
The first flight is an impressive milestone in space exploration, paving the way for future missions on the red planet to use the skies, explore new areas of the surface, and investigate the dusty, dead plains of Mars.
Learning to fly on Earth was difficult enough, but flying on Mars was a major technical challenge. Mars’ atmosphere is only 1% as thick as Earth’s, so a standard kite wouldn’t cut it. NASA has now shown it was up to the task.
The shadow of Ingenuity on the surface of Mars. You can just leave the marks left by the Perseverance rover.
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.
Look at this:
Watch NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter fly on Mars
5:23
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 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. A second flight is scheduled for April 22 at the earliest.
It may not have traveled the same distance as the Wright brothers Kitty Hawk, but Ingenuity has opened a path to achieve achievements just as stunning elsewhere in the cosmos.
Additional reporting by CNET’s Katie Collins.
Follow CNET’s 2021 Space Calendar to keep up with the latest space travel news this year. You can even add it to your own Google calendar.