NASA is successfully flying a small helicopter on the surface of Mars
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| Helicopter flying on the surface of Mars |
The US space agency has successfully launched a small helicopter on Mars.
The drone, called Ingenuity, has been airborne for less than a minute, but NASA celebrates what marks the first powered and controlled flight by an aircraft in another world.
The confirmation came via a satellite on Mars transmitting helicopter data to Earth.
The space agency is promising more adventurous flights in the coming days.
Innovation will be required to fly higher and farther as engineers strive to test the limits of technology.
The helicopter was transported to Mars in the belly of NASA's persistent rover, which landed in the Jezero crater on the Red Planet in February.
"We can now say that humans have flown a helicopter on another planet," said Mi Ong, innovation project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"We've been talking for a long time about the" Wright Brothers' moment "on Mars, and here it is."
This is an allusion to Wilbur and Orville Wright who made the first flight of powered and controlled aircraft here on Earth in 1903.
Creativity even holds a small piece of cloth from one of the wings of Flyer 1, the plane that made that historic flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina more than 117 years ago.
There were cheers at the JPL control center as the first images of the flight reached Earth. In the background, MiMi Aung can be heard saying: "It's real!"
To applause from her colleagues, she tore up the emergency speech to use in case of failure.
The demonstration saw the Martian helicopter rise to just over 3 meters, hover, rotate 96 degrees, hover further, and then take off. Altogether, I managed to fly for about 40 seconds, from takeoff to landing.
Flying on the red planet is not easy. The atmosphere is very thin, only 1% of the Earth's density here. This gives the blades on the rotor plane very little to bite into to increase lift.
There's help from Mars' low-gravity, but still - it takes a lot of work to get up from Earth.
Therefore, creativity became very light and endowed the power (350W peak power) to turn these blades very quickly - at over 2,500 revolutions per minute for this particular ride.
Control was independent. The distance to Mars - currently just under 300 million kilometers - means that radio signals take minutes to traverse the interfering space. Flying with a joystick is simply out of the question.
When asked if she was surprised that the flight had succeeded, Mi Ong said, “No, I am not. We have already named equations and models and verified here on Earth in our laboratory tests. So, it then became a question: Did we choose the right materials to build Creativity, to survive in the space environment, to survive in the environment of Mars?
She told BBC News: "We went from 'theory says you can' to really do now. It's the first major mission of humankind."
Versatility has two cameras on board. A black and white camera that points to the ground, used for navigation, and a high-resolution color camera that looks out over the horizon.
Navigational imagery sent to Earth revealed the shadow of the helicopter on the floor of the crater as it returned to land.
The persevering rover was watching and cruising from 65 meters away. Watch his full sequence video at the top of this page.
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