A monochrome photo taken by Ingenuity's navigation camera showing the shadow of the helicopter as it hovered over the Martian surface.
Photo by: Nasa
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Ingenuity technology demonstrator drone helicopter successfully made its first flight on Mars on Monday. The flight took place at about noon, South African time.
This marks a very major milestone in the history of flight: the first time a human aircraft has flown in the atmosphere of another planet. It must also be remembered that Mars has a very thin atmosphere, making flight there much more difficult than on Earth.
The autonomous helicopter spun up its two contra-rotating rotors, took off, hovered, flew brief distances to the left and to the right, descended, landed and spun down its rotors. During the flight it reached an altitude of about 3 m.
The flight was very brief, but the very first controlled flight of a powered heavier-than-air flying machine, by the Wright brothers, lasted only some 12 seconds. That flight had been on December 17, 1903. That Ingenuity’s first flight on Mars came only 117 years and four months later – an insignificant period in terms of human history – is clear illustration of the speed with which aviation and rocketry have developed since then.
Ingenuity has a mass of 2 kg, and being purely a technology demonstrator, it carries no scientific payload. It was transported to Mars in the belly of Nasa’s Perseverance lander, and subsequently deployed on to the Martian surface. Perseverance mounts Ingenuity’s base station, which stores and relays communications between the drone and Earth.
A software glitch had forced a postponement of the maiden flight. The Ingenuity team, based at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in the US state of California, developed and reinstalled updated software, curing the problem.