Ingenuity Flies On Mars Making History

Latest update on the historical flight of Ingenuity the first on another planet.

Shadow of Ingenuity on historic first flight | Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech

It has happened the helicopter has flown on the red planet, the first-ever powered flight outside Earth! This is the Wright brothers moment when powered flight occurred on Earth. NASA held a live event at 6.15am (EDT) to announce the news to the world.

The successful news came back at 6.51am (EDT) with the telemetry data showing that the 1.8Kg helicopter had risen off the surface. Next came a black and white image from the navigation camera which showed the shadow of the helicopter below.

Then came a video from Perseverance showing the takeoff, hovering and landing of the helicopter to rapturous cheers from everyone on the helicopter team at JPL.

We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet MiMi Aung, Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Project Manager

What happened on the first flight?

The helicopter blades spun up to 2,537 RPM. It then ascended 3 meters vertically, before hovering for 30 seconds, then descended to the ground. It took 2 and half hours for the data to get back to earth.

Perseverance rover downloaded the first set of engineering data from Ingenuity, it was then sent to the orbiting Mars satellite. Which in turn sent it to earth. After a couple of hours, the complete data arrives at NASA Deep Space Network and then at JPL for processing. Further images and video will follow in the days after.

Flight technology demonstration

The difficulties of flight on Mars shouldn’t be underestimated. With the atmosphere a mere 1% of the earth the blades need to give a lot more lift. A normal helicopter on Earth spins its rotor blades at between 400 to 500 RPM. The Mars helicopter needs to spin at over 2000 RPM to lift off the ground.

And remember this is a test flight, a proof of concept. Ingenuity has a month to complete a further 4 flights before Perseverance has to move on to complete its primary mission. In the future helicopters, bigger and better will fly on Mars and possibly carrying humans on sightseeing trips.

Technology

The technology used on Ingenuity is mainly off the shelf parts and the software that runs everything uses Linux. Read more on my previous article on Mars helicopter 10 interesting facts.

Thanks for reading, you can find out more on the build-up to the first flight on Mars here and about Perseverance the Mars rover.

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