PIECE OF WRIGHT BROTHERS’ HISTORY TO FLY ON MARS
DAYTON, OHIO» A small piece of Wright brothers history is on
Mars, being readied for another historic flight — this time, on the red planet’s surface.
A swatch of material from the 1903 Wright Flyer will be attached to a new rotorcraft that NASA hopes to free from its Mars Perseverance rover no later than April 8.
In more than 100 years, the cloth has traveled from Ohio to North Carolina, back to Ohio and now to Mars.
Dayton’s Carillon Historical
Park donated the postage-stampsize piece of cloth from the plane’s bottom left wing at NASA’s request, said Brady Kress, president and chief executive of Dayton History.
This work with the rotorcraft will be not only NASA’s first attempt at flying the four-pound craft — but its first attempt overall at powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet.
“Wilbur and Orville Wright would be pleased to know that a little piece of their 1903 Wright Flyer I, the machine that launched the Space Age by barely one quarter of a mile, is going to soar into history again on Mars!” Amanda Wright Lane and Stephen Wright said in a statement provided by Kress.
The piece of muslin was part of the craft that achieved the first powered, controlled flight, on Dec. 17, 1903, above the dunes of Kill Devil Hill in North Carolina. Dayton’s Orville and Wilbur Wright covered 120 feet in 12 seconds in that first flight. (Orville, having won a coin toss, was airborne first. The brothers took turns flying after that.)
The brothers went on to refine controlled flight above Huffman Prairie northeast of Dayton, on land today controlled by WrightPatterson Air Force Base.
According to NASA, insulative tape was used to wrap the small swatch of the Wright Flyer fabric around a cable located underneath the Mars helicopter’s solar panel.
NASA’s Apollo 11 crew flew a different piece of the material, along with a small splinter of wood from the Flyer, to the moon and back to Earth in Apollo 11’s July 1969 mission.