In a hardscrabble crater on Mars, a tiny helicopter with a smartphone brain is now days away from attempting the first powered flight on another world. NASA hopes its spindly robotic helicopter, called Ingenuity, will prove powered flight is possible in the dangerously thin Martian sky and help usher in a new era of planetary exploration in which drones play a vital role.
Ingenuity reached Mars as a stowaway, folded at the bottom of NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on the red planet in February after traveling seven months and 293 million miles from Earth. For its maiden flight, the 4-pound, $ 85 million craft will simply rise and float about 3 feet above the surface – no higher than the edge of a prescribed basketball hoop – before returning to the surface. The entire flight must be over in 90 seconds.
The short excursion – one of five scheduled for a one-month period expected to begin on or around April 11 – is a short trip through the measures of interplanetary travel. But agency officials said it would be a giant leap for Mars exploration. In the future, they said, autonomous drones like Ingenuity could take to the skies to explore canyons, ice sheets, and other terrain inaccessible to rovers. Should human explorers ever land on Mars, drones could serve as scouts and air sensors.
“We hope Ingenuity will enable us to expand and unlock air mobility on Mars,” said Bob Balaram, chief engineer on the project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Ingenuity’s flight, part of a broader mission to look for signs of past life on the red planet, is the latest in a series of notable Mars moments this year.