This small helicopter is set to be the first aircraft to fly on another planet.
Ingenuity is a 1.8kg (4lb) helicopter that rode to Mars inside Nasa’s Perseverance Rover which arrived in February 2021.
Nasa wants to be first to demonstrate powered flight in Mars’ thin atmosphere. But doing that isn’t so straight-forward on the Red Planet.
The Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity, is a technology demonstration to test powered flight on another world for the first time. It hitched a ride to Mars on the Perseverance rover. Once the team finds a suitable “helipad” location, the rover will release Ingenuity to perform a series of test flights over a 30-Martian-day experimental window beginning sometime in the spring.
For the first flight, the helicopter will take off a few feet from the ground, hover in the air for about 20 to 30 seconds, and land. That will be a major milestone: the very first powered flight in the extremely thin atmosphere of Mars. After that, the team will attempt additional experimental flights of incrementally farther distance and greater altitude. After the helicopter completes its technology demonstration, Perseverance will continue its scientific mission.
The “Mars helicopter has been fully tested as much as we can on Earth,” MiMi Aung, the Ingenuity project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a news conference Tuesday the 16th of February 2021.