NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter first flew to Mars on Monday – and the Perseverance rover captured the entire feat in crisp video.
The rover, which took Ingenuity nearly 300 million miles to Mars, sat at a lookout point 211 feet away and saw the historic flight take place at 3:34 a.m. ET.
In the video below, you can see Ingenuity start spinning its rotors, spinning them at full speed (five times faster than the rotors of a helicopter on Earth) and then raising itself 3 meters above the surface of Mars. Then it floats, turns to persistence and gently sinks itself back into the dust.
The entire flight took about 40 seconds.
“Goosebumps. It looks exactly like we tested,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity’s project manager, as she presented the video at a post-flight press conference Monday. ‘Absolutely beautiful flight. I don’t think I can ever stop looking at it over and over again. ‘
This was the first powered controlled flight ever conducted on another planet – NASA’s “Wright Brothers Moment,” as agency officials call it.
“From everything we’ve seen so far, it has been a flawless flight,” said Håvard Grip, the helicopter’s lead pilot, during the briefing. “It was a quiet start. At high altitudes, it gets a little bit pushed around by the wind, but it holds the station really well, and it stays right where it needs to go.”
Ingenuity is a technology demonstration mission – it will not practice science. Now that NASA has shown that the helicopter technology works, future space helicopters can explore canyons, caves and rocky fields that are too dangerous for rovers. Mars drones could even do reconnaissance for future astronauts.
The first of up to 5 daring helicopter flights
An artist’s concept of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter flying through the skies of Mars.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Ingenuity has achieved its main goal – to prove that helicopter technology can work on Mars – but its mission is not over yet. Over the next two weeks, the space drone will attempt to make up to four additional flights, venturing higher and further each time. The next flight could come on Thursday, according to Aung.
“We really want to push the helicopter to its limits and really learn and get information from that,” she said.
NASA plans to turn on Perseverance’s microphone to record audio in future flight videos, although NASA engineers aren’t sure what it will sound like. If all goes well, Ingenuity’s fifth and final venture could make it up to 4.5 meters high at 980 feet from Mars ground.
But by then “it would be unlikely that we would land safely as we are going to unexplored areas,” Aung said in a preflight briefing.
“If we have a bad landing, that’s the end of the mission,” she added. “Longevity is determined by how well it lands, pretty much.”
Once Ingenuity’s mission is over, the Perseverance rover will continue its own epic journey: searching for fossils of microbial alien life in the ancient river delta of Jezero Crater.