NASA did it:fly their little Ingenuity helicopter to Mars. This is the very first powered flight ever attempted and successful on another planet. The American agency and its engineers, once again, are making history.
For several days the mission engineers had been preparing for the first flight attempt of the Ingenuity rotorcraft. NASA had proposed a first test for April 8, then for April 11. Unfortunately, a problem recorded during a rotor test caused engineers to redesign Ingenuity's flight software.
Concretely, the mission team, led by project manager MiMi Aung, worked on a fix involving the addition of a few commands to the flight sequence. These changes obviously required extensive testing and validation before being sent to the helicopter.
These successful maintenance operations, a first test flight was finally to be attempted this Monday morning around 9:15 a.m. (French time).
However, we had to wait a few hours to know if everything had gone well (or not), the time for the helicopter to transfer its data to Perseverance, which had to load to relay them to a Mars probe in orbit. This data was then sent back to Earth before being picked up by NASA antennas.
During this first flight, Ingenuity soared just over 3 meters for 39.1 seconds before landing successfully, according to altimeter data. The rotorcraft took a picture of its cast shadow while hovering:
Perseverance was also placed at a good distance in an attempt to document the event (sounds and images). Here is a snapshot taken by the rover allowing us to appreciate Ingenuity above the ground:
And here it is again after landing:
“Today, 117 years later Whether the Wright Brothers managed to make the first flight on our planet, NASA's Ingenuity Helicopter managed to achieve this incredible feat on another world “, said Thomas Zurbuchen, the administrator of the agency. “While these two iconic moments in aviation history may be separated by time and over 250 million miles of space, they will now be forever linked “.
The Ingenuity team still has thirty days to attempt other, slightly more ambitious flights over longer distances and higher altitudes.
After these thirty days of test flights, Ingenuity will be abandoned in place, opening (we hope) the way to other flying vehicles likely to integrate future missions . These machines could offer a unique point of view to astronauts by spotting traversal routes inaccessible by rovers. They could also allow the transport or recovery of small payloads.
The Perseverance rover will finally be able to focus on its main mission in Jezero Crater, which is to search for possible signs of past life.
