Heavier than Air Flight Completed on Mars
Four pound drone helicopter on the Martian surface as it prepares to take flight. (NASA/JPL/Caltech)
Perseverance’s drone helicopter successfully flew 10 feet above the Martian surface for 39.1 seconds. The helicopter weighs 4 pounds and its rotors spun 2500+ revolutions per minute. The helicopter carried with it a piece of fabric from the craft that the Wright brothers flew 117 years ago.
From CNBC:
“Now, 117 years after the Wright brothers succeeded in making the first flight on our planet, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has succeeded in performing this amazing feat on another world,” NASA associate administrator for science Thomas Zurbuchen said in a statement. “While these two iconic moments in aviation history may be separated by time and 173 million miles of space, they now will forever be linked.”
The flight was autonomous, given the 15-minute delay in communication’s between NASA’s location in California and the surface of the red planet.
The helicopter carried a tiny piece of fabric from the wing of Flyer 1, the Wright brothers’ aircraft that in 1903 made the first powered flights on Earth.
“Like the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, we know that our time to make a difference at Jezero Crater, Mars is not yet over — this is just the first great flight,” JPL’s MiMi Aung, the Ingenuity’s project manager, said on the webcast.
You can read more of the CNBC article on this historic event here.
Category: NASA
So who gets the Air Medal for this sortie?
Jimmy Walls. He’s at the JPL press conference right now explaining why the left skid is low.
If All-Points Logistics had the contact it would not have even gotten airborne….
Surprised the Martians did shoot it down.
aOc (worst bar tender ever) cant be in two places at once.
Someone may want to edit the write-up – Ingenuity is the drone that flew, Perseverance is the rover that carried it to Mars.
I was waiting, ThunderFoot on YouTube said in was leaning towards no/go.
Does it have a robotic door gunner? As a tax payer I think it should.
The cloaked Martians are smiling at the devices we keep sending to their planet. Maybe one day we’ll see what they have. 🙂
There are no Martians. After building his first rocket, the first thing Chuck Norris did was to visit Mars. That’s why there is no life on Mars.
I thought Chuck was born on Mars, but got bored so he threw himself to Earth to have something to do!
He taught himself to speak English, in a week, by deciphering the markings on our probes.
“Maybe one day we’ll see what they have. :D” – STSC(SW/SS)
The Martians have been “sending” probes to earth, they’re probably wondering if we will notice.