CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – Part of the Wright brothers’ first plane is on Mars.
NASA’s experimental Mars helicopter contains a small piece of fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer, the space agency revealed Tuesday. The helicopter, dubbed Ingenuity, hitchhiked to the red planet with the Perseverance rover, arriving last month.
Ingenuity will attempt the first powered controlled flight on another planet no earlier than April 8. It will mark a “moment of the Wright brothers,” said Bobby Braun, director of planetary science at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The Carillon Historical Park in Dayton, Ohio, the birthplace of the Wrights, at the request of NASA donated the postage-sized piece of muslin from the lower left wing of the plane.
The steel made the 300 million mile journey to Mars with the blessing of the Wright brothers’ great-grandniece and great-grandnephew, said park curator Steve Lucht.
“Wilbur and Orville Wright would be pleased to hear that a small piece of their 1903 Wright Flyer I, the machine that launched the space age by barely a quarter of a mile, will fly back into history on Mars!” Amanda Wright Lane and Stephen Wright said in a statement from the park.
Orville Wright was aboard the world’s first powered controlled flight on December 17, 1903 in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The brothers took turns and made four flights that day.
A fragment of Wright Flyer wood and fabric flew to the moon on Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong in 1969. A sample also accompanied John Glenn in orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998. Both astronauts were from Ohio.
NASA’s 4-pound (1.8 kilogram) helicopter will attempt to take off 10 feet (3 meters) in the extremely thin Mars sky on its first jump. Up to five increasingly higher and longer flights are planned over the course of a month.
The material is taped to a cable under the helicopter’s solar panel, which is perched on it like a graduate’s mortarboard.
For now, Ingenuity remains attached to the robber’s belly. A protective shield fell over the weekend, exposing the spindly, leggy helicopter.
The helicopter airfield is located right next to the rover’s landing site in Jezero Crater. The rover will observe the test flights from a distant perch, before driving off to pursue its own mission: to hunt for signs of ancient Martian life. Rock monsters will be reserved for a possible return to Earth.
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