NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter took this photo while hovering above the surface of Mars on April 19, 2021.
NASA / JPL-CalTech
Humanity’s first flight to another planet was short, but it was super sweet. On Monday, NASA shared the full video and additional photos taken from the Perseverance on Mars from his sidekick, a small helicopter called Ingenuity, in action.
“This is truly a Wright Brothers moment,” acting NASA administrator Steve Jurczyk said in a news conference Monday.
The 1.8 kilogram solar-powered plane lifted from the floor of Jezero Crater at 12:34 p.m. PT (3:34 a.m. ET), climbed to a height of 10 feet (3 meters), made a 96-degree turn in the air, and held a steady float for 30 seconds. It then landed in almost exactly the same spot after a total of 39 seconds of flight.
The whole thing is captured in the above video, shot in 1,280×720 resolution by the Mastcam-Z camera on persistence from the rover’s vantage point about 211 feet (64.3 meters) away.
“It’s being pushed around a bit in the wind,” explains Håvard Grip, Ingenuity’s lead pilot, watching the video Monday, “and it got stuck on landing.”
A downward-facing black and white navigation camera on Ingenuity also captured some footage during the flight.
Grip announced that the International Civil Aviation Organization has assigned Ingenuity an official designation, IGY, and that the flight site has the ceremonial designation JZRO for Jezero Crater.
NASA has named the location of Ingenuity’s maiden flight Wright Brothers Field, in honor of the iconic American flight pioneers.
Ingenuity made the long journey to Mars in the belly of Perseverance, and it was fell to the surface of Mars on April 3, a few weeks after the rover landed on Feb. 18.
Monday’s short glider flight is expected to be the first of at least a handful of flight attempts for the small helicopter.
Ingenuity project manager MiMi Aung says she hopes to squeeze about four more flights in the remaining two weeks of the experimental flight period. She said the flights aim to expand the machine’s capabilities to go further and faster.
“We will push boundaries,” Aung said, adding that her team will continue to review all data for the next flight attempt, but that the current target for Ingenuity’s next test is next Thursday.
When asked if Ingenuity’s ultimate fate could be a crash, she replied, “Ultimately, we expect the helicopter to reach its limit.”
Stay tuned. It is just starting to heat up on the frozen red planet now that humanity’s space robots are no longer grounded.
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