Extract from ABC News
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter may only have been in the air for less than a minute, but it has gone down in history as the first aircraft to achieve powered flight on Mars.
Key points:
- The first human-made powered aircraft has successfully flown on another planet
- Data confirming the successful flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter arrived at NASA just before 9:00pm AEST on Monday
- Footage of the flight, as well as a still image of the surface of March from the helicopter, were also been sent back to Earth
The NASA team watched at command headquarters as the first data, which included a grainy black and white image, confirmed the flight was successful.
An image from the helicopter sent back to Earth showed the surface of the Mars with a shadow of the aircraft.
Just minutes later, video footage from the Perseverance rover, captured from its vantage point 65 metres away, showed the successful flight, which reached a height of approximately three metres.
"We can confirm it has made its first flight on Mars," MiMi Aung, project manager of Ingenuity, said.
"We've been talking for so long about our Wright brothers moment, and here it is."
The Ingenuity helicopter was a last-minute addition to NASA's Perseverance rover, which landed on the Red Planet in February.
Built over three years at a cost of $US80 million ($105 million) from high-tech and off-the-shelf components, the helicopter had a singular mission: to prove it could fly.
Unlike drones on
Earth, Ingenuity operates entirely autonomously based on a set of
preprogrammed instructions and using its cameras and sensors to stay on
track.
After a software glitch delayed the first flight by a week, the helicopter was given the all go to fly late Monday afternoon AEST.
The first flight was a simple rise, hover roughly 40 seconds, and return to its landing spot.
Over the next month, Ingenuity will perform up to another four flights roughly every three Martian days.
All going well, each flight will become increasingly ambitious.
The
next two flights will take the helicopter up to five metres above the
surface and moving up to 15 metres forward and back to the landing area.
The paths for flight four and five will depend upon these earlier flights.
The helicopter's mission will end at the end of April.
As the helicopter falls silent, the rover will drive away and get ready to start the main mission: to hunt for evidence of past life on Mars.
Helicopter will transform drones on Mars – and Earth
While the images collected by the helicopter during its flights will not contribute to the main mission, they could help design more robust drones.
The use of drones could transform exploration of the red planet, according to David Flannery, who is working on NASA's Perseverance mission based at the Queensland University of Technology.
“We’ll be able to do a lot more science, cover a lot more ground and use much cheaper parts," he said.
The successful flight of Ingenuity will also have implications for the drone revolution on Earth, said Dr Flannery, who has also worked on a number of projects designing robot and drone technologies for NASA.
“Often these things that happen in space give you a bit of a preview to how things will pan out on Earth in the not too distant future,” he said.
"There are various components that need to be understood like: How do these things navigate? How do they decide how to allocate resources? How do they communicate with each other?"
“These problems are being solved by research groups who are working at the cutting edge."
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