Last February, NASA landed its
Perseverance rover on the planet Mars after a journey through space that lasted
since July last year. The rover packs in its SUV-sized chassis a wide array of
instruments for analyzing the Martian soil, plus gadgets to perform experiments
with on the Red Planet’s surface. These include a CO2-O2 converter and a nifty
little helicopter drone called Ingenuity. Ingenuity is to set a milestone for
undertaking the first powered flight by a manmade craft on another world. After
a series of delays, the date was set for the probe’s test flight this past
Monday. Needless to say, it was successful.
The Verge reports that the Ingenuity helicopter drone packaged with
the Perseverance Mars rover performed as expected on the early hours of April
19, according to NASA. Shaped like a tissue box and weighing only four pounds,
Ingenuity lifted off with its solar-powered twin rotors at about 12:34 PM Mars
time (or 3:34 US Eastern Time on Earth), after being deployed from the
underside of Perseverance back in April 3. Its vertical hovering flight lasted
only about 39 seconds (30 in midair), but it set new records and promised
greater possibilities for future Mars missions.
With Ingenuity’s success, NASA
and other space agencies around the world can now seriously consider new Mars
probe design concepts beyond the stationary lander and the ground-bound rover.
Rotorcraft probes could be the next step in covering large areas of the Martian
surface for exploration in years to come, the better to tell what to expect
when manned Mars missions, or even Martian colonization, is finally on the
discussion table. “We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on
another planet,” says Ingenuity project manager MiMi Aung from the NASA Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, where the helicopter craft’s engineering control team was
stationed.
In a nod to history, Ingenuity
carried under its solar panel a fragment of wing from the 1903 Flyer aircraft
of the Wright Brothers, similar to how another wing piece was also brought to
the Moon and back in 1969 aboard Apollo 11. The surface on Mars’s Jezero crater
where Ingenuity took off and landed is now given the name Wright Brothers
Field. Photos were taken from the probe’s down-facing navigation camera,
alongside footage taken by the main Perseverance rover, “watching” the test
flight from 211 feet away. NASA provided a live stream of the images which took
three hours to reach Earth from Mars.
Image courtesy of CBS News
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