NASA helicopter breaks records with flight on Mars

NASA's experimental Mars helicopter rose from the dusty red surface into the thin air on Monday, achieving the first powered flight by an aircraft on another planet. (April 19)

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    Cheering at NASA on Monday as its little drone helicopter on Mars made a historic flight, marking the first time that humans have controlled an aircraft on an alien planet.... and beaming back a single image.Taryn Bailey, an engineer on the project, streamed it live from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory headquarters in California."So the image we're looking at on the screen is the image from our on-board navigation camera, showing us hovering above the surface of Mars. How incredible!"UNIDENTIFIED: "And that's its shadow, right Taryn?""Yes that's its shadow. So, the onboard navigation camera points straight down so we're seeing its shadow right now."UNIDENTIFIED: "I can just hear (Project Manager) MiMi (Aung) in the background, 'This is real! This is real!' So amazing."The helicopter, called Ingenuity, didn't fly for long. This was just a test flight.A camera on the Mars rover, Perseverance, which was parked about 200 feet away, caught part of it on video.It went went up 10 feet, hovered for 39 seconds, and landed again. But make no mistake, this is being compared to the Wright Brothers' first flight back in 1903, which itself only lasted 12 seconds.In fact, NASA attached a tiny piece of the original Wright Brothers flyer to the underside of Ingenuity before it was launched to Mars: a piece of history, making history again.

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    NASA will attempt to fly a remote-control helicopter on Mars early Monday, aiming for humanity's first powered, controlled flight on another planet. The solar-powered lightweight helicopter, Ingenuity, hitched a ride to Mars on the belly of the Perseverance rover, which will help Ingenuity communicate with mission control and also record the test flight from about 330 feet away. NASA will try to get Ingenuity to rise to about 10 feet above the Martian surface, hover for about 20 seconds, then land back at its airfield in Jerezo Crater. Ingenuity is the product of six years of work at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. This will be the second attempt to get it in the air, after a "watchdog" timer glitch forced NASA to call off an April 11 test flight. NASA successfully tested the rotors on Friday, and it has a plan and a backup plan for Monday's flight, wrote MiMi Aung, Ingenuity project manager at JPL. If Plan A doesn't work, Perseverance will send Ingenuity an update for its flight control software, putting off the test flight for several more days. "Our team considers Monday's attempted first flight like a rocket launch: We're doing everything we can to make it a success, but we also know that we may have to scrub and try again," Aung wrote in an April 17 post. "In engineering, there is always uncertainty, but this is what makes working on advanced technology so exciting and rewarding. We have to continually innovate and develop solutions to new challenges. And we get to try things others have only dreamed of." The test flight will commence at about 3:30 a.m. EDT, but the data and images won't reach Earth for another few hours. NASA's JPL will broadcast the flight starting at 6:15 a.m. EDT, and you can watch the livestream below. More stories from theweek.comThe new HBO show you won't be able to stop watchingDonald Trump's most dangerous political legacyTrump's NSA general counsel Michael Ellis resigns, never having taken office

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