The mini-helicopter on Mars successfully hovered 10ft in the air before touching back down on the planet’s surface
A mini-helicopter on Mars has made the first ever unmanned flight on another planet, NASA has said.
The Mars Ingenuity mini-helicopter took to the skies of the Red Planet this morning, flying 10ft (three metres) in the air before then touching back down onto the planet’s surface, the space agency has said.
It marks NASA‘s first attempt to use a powered, controlled helicopter flight on another planet.
The news had been met by cheers and applause at mission control, with pictures from the mission showing the craft hovering.
It’s a longstanding mystery of how Mars lost the water that had previously flowed on the planet’s surface billions of years ago. Scientists now think that they have an answer; that much of the water on Mars became trapped within the outer layer of the planet, which is its crust.
MiMi Aung, the project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, said: “We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet.”
Data from the first helicopter flight had returned to Earth a few hours following the autonomous test.
NASA’s Perseverance rover had provided support during the flight operations, taking images, collecting environmental data, and hosting the base station that has enabled NASA to be able to see the helicopter’s successful mission.
Ingenuity Mars works autonomously and cannot be controlled by NASA due to the distance between Earth and Mars, it takes over 11 minutes to get transmit a radio signal 287 million kilometres (178 million miles) back to Earth.
The original flight date of the 11th of April had been postponed as engineers worked on the pre-flight checks and a solution to an issue with the command sequence.
Standing at only 50cm tall, the $85 million rotorcraft weighs 1.8kg on Earth, but only weighs 0.68kg on Mars due to the red planet’s lower gravity.
The rotor blades of the helicopter, which measure 1.2m across, rotated 40 times a second to get enough power to lift off within the Martian atmosphere, which is around 100 times thinner than Earth’s atmosphere.
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Ingenuity first has arrived at the planet’s Jezero Crater on the 18th of February following an eight-month journey spanning nearly 300 million miles, and has been kept inside the body of the Perseverance rover.
After the spacecraft landed on the red planet, it dropped the drone onto the ground so that Ingenuity could begin to prepare for its first flight.
One of Ingenuity’s key objectives was to survive the “bone-chilling temperatures” of Mars, with “nights as cold as minus 90C”, NASA had said ahead of the flight.
Ingenuity will attempt additional experimental flights, travelling further distances and at increasing altitudes.
All together the helicopter will aim for up to five test flights within 30 Martian days.
