Is there a fly on Mars? No, it’s our first drone flight!
WE HAVE take-off – and a happy landing! Nasa scientists have pulled off the first controlled flight on Mars.
A tiny 4lb helicopter called Ingenuity rose 10ft above the red planet’s surface before hovering for 40 seconds, rotating, then descending and landing successfully on its four legs.
The feat echoes the Wright Brothers’ first controlled flight on Earth in December 1903, when they travelled 120ft in 12 seconds at Kitty Wake in North Carolina.
Scientists cheered and clapped the maiden voyage of the solar-powered twin-rotor drone, which beamed back data to Nasa’s jet propulsion laboratory, 173million miles away in Los Angeles.
‘We can now say human beings have flown an aircraft on another planet,’ said Ingenuity project manager MiMi Aung.
The first image of the flight – which took three hours to be beamed back – was a black and white photo taken by a downward-pointing on-board camera.
Ingenuity’s shadow – cast by the Martian sunlight – could be seen on the dusty ground.
A snippet of colour video from a camera mounted on Nasa’s Mars rover Perseverance, parked 200ft away, showed the helicopter in flight against the orangecoloured landscape. Nasa said Ingenuity’s success could pave the way for new ways of exploring Mars and other destinations in the solar system, such as Venus and Saturn’s moon Titan.
The tiny craft was strapped to the underbelly of Perseverance for the seven-month journey to Mars.
A tiny scrap of the wing fabric from the Wright Brothers’ Wright Flyer craft was built into Ingenuity to celebrate the historic link.