Remember that NASA helicopter-type explorer whose flight got delayed due to an error a few days back? Well, the delay is over and it just flew for a few seconds on Mars. The Ingenuity Mars helicopter is a culmination of many years of hard work from the engineers at NASA. NASA now has one more explorer on Mars.
The maiden flight took place on Monday during the early hours. The Ingenuity helicopter climbed to approximately ten feet off the ground. After that, it proceeded to hover at its place for about 5 seconds. Then it showed off some moves by turning ninety degrees to each side and continued hovering for thirty seconds more.
Now you might think this isn’t a big deal but let me tell you. Designing a helicopter to properly fly on Mars is way harder than on Earth. The atmosphere is totally different.
NASA celebrated the event by calling it history on their twitter handle.
Now if you think the video quality is bad, we got you covered there as well. A high-resolution version of the same video has been released on video on YouTube as well. Now it is still 720p but it’s hard to get 4K cameras up to space. The video itself was captured by Mastcam Z cameras on the Perseverance rover. The rover was standing a few feet away to catch its brother making its first flight ever.
You can view the video below.
The helicopter was developed by the engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the team is very excited to push the helicopter to its limits. According to Principal investigator Mimi Aung “We are going to continually push all the way to the limit of this rotorcraft”.