Ingenuity, a NASA helicopter no heavier than a two-liter bottle of soda , has achieved the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. The feat …
Ingenuity, a NASA helicopter no heavier than a two-liter bottle of soda, has achieved the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. The feat took place at 12:31 a.m. PT on Monday morning, but it wasn’t until over three hours later that NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory received the first data from Mars. The first flight of Ingenuity is an impressive milestone in space exploration, paving the way for future missions to the red planet to utilize the skies. Learning to fly on Earth was difficult enough, but flying on Mars was a grand engineering challenge. NASA has shown that it was up to the task. „We’ve been talking for so long about our Wright Brothers moment on Mars, and here it is,“ said Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Project Manager MiMi Aung, after ripping up her contingency speech. „We can now say that humans have flown a rotorcraft on another planet.“ Ingenuity was not controlled by engineers on Earth during its attempt. Instead, commands were uploaded to the spacecraft that took it from preflight checks to powered flight in a matter of seconds.
