‘Wright brothers moment’
NASA’s helicopter on Mars is first flight on another world
Asmall robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the wispy air of the red planet. It was the first machine from Earth ever to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world.
The achievement extends NASA’s long, exceptional record of firsts on Mars.
“We together flew at Mars,” MiMi Aung, the project manager for Ingenuity, said to her team during the celebration. “And we together now have this Wright brothers moment.”
Like the first flight of an airplane by Wilbur and Orville Wright in 1903, the flight did not go far or last long, but it showed what could be done. Flying in the thin atmosphere of Mars was a particularly tricky technical endeavor, on the edge of impossible because there is almost no air to push against. NASA engineers employed ultralight materials, fast-spinning blades and high-powered computer processing to get Ingenuity off the ground and keep it from veering off and crashing.
And just as the Wright plane led to a transformation in how people and goods zip around Earth, Ingenuity offers a new mode of transportation that NASA can now use as it studies the solar system’s mysteries. Future robotic explorers, with this technology under the agency’s belt may take
new, unconventional shapes.
“What the Ingenuity team has done,” said Michael Watkins, the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where the helicopter was built, during a news conference, “is given us the third dimension. They freed us from the surface now and forever in planetary exploration.”
Ingenuity was also something different for NASA — a high-risk, high-reward project with a modest price tag where failure was an acceptable outcome.
That approach is more similar to that of nimble space companies like SpaceX than large traditional development programs that work through every possible contingency to build a full-scale machine that has to work the first time.
Ingenuity was thus a small experiment tacked onto NASA’s Mars rover, Perseverance, but it has the potential for a paradigm-breaking advance.
Perhaps a more advanced helicopter could serve as a scout for a future rover, identifying intriguing locations for closer study and safe routes for the rover to drive there. Or swarms of helicopters could zip up and down cliff faces to examine layers of rock that are too far away or out of view of current spacecraft.
There are no current plans to put a second helicopter on Mars. But Bob Balaram, the chief engineer of Ingenuity, said he and colleagues had begun sketching out designs for a larger Mars helicopter with about 10 times the mass and capable of carrying some 10 pounds of science equipment.
“That would be, I think, the good sweet spot for the next-generation design,” Balaram said.
On Sunday, mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California radioed the commands for the test to Perseverance, which landed on Mars in February. Perseverance in turn relayed the commands to Ingenuity, which was sitting 200 feet away on flat terrain that was chosen to serve as the airstrip for a series of five test flights.
At 1:34 a.m. Mountain time — it was the middle of the Martian day, half an hour past noon — the helicopter spun up its rotors as it had been commanded and rose above Jezero crater, into the Martian sky.
At the surface of Mars, the atmosphere is just 1 percent as dense as Earth’s, not much for helicopter blades to push against. Thus, to generate enough lift for the 4-pound Ingenuity to rise up, its two rotors, each about 4 feet wide, had to spin in opposite directions at more than 2,500 revolutions per minute.
It hovered at a height of some 10 feet for about 30 seconds. Then it descended back to the surface.
But at that moment, no one on Earth — including people at NASA — knew what was actually happening. The two spacecraft were not in communication with Earth during the test, and Ingenuity had to perform all of its actions autonomously.
It was only three hours later that one of NASA’s other Mars spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, passed overhead, and Perseverance could relay the test data back to Earth.
Minutes later, engineers analyzed the results that showed a successful flight.
Havard Grip, the engineer who serves as NASA’s chief pilot for Ingenuity, announced as the data arrived that the helicopter had completed “the first powered flight of a powered aircraft on another planet.”
NASA officials said they have named the airstrip where Ingenuity took off and landed Wright Brothers Field. A small piece of fabric from the original Wright airplane was glued to Ingenuity and sent to Mars.
Aung told her team to celebrate the moment. “And then after that, let’s get back to work and more flights,” she said.