Ingenuity: NASA Makes History Again With First Controlled Flight on Mars

First Mars flight images take four hours to reach Earth

The historic moment occurred at 03:34 EDT (07:34 UTC) though data and images, beamed from the Mars Perseverance rover to NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN), took approximately four hours to reach mission control in their entirety.

You wouldn’t believe what I just saw.

More images and video to come...#MarsHelicopterhttps://t.co/PLapgbHeZU pic.twitter.com/mbiOGx4tJZ

— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) April 19, 2021

In turn, these images were first revealed to the world via a live stream video (embedded below) from NASA TV.

Images and video, revealed during the livestream, show the brief moments in which the Ingenuity helicopter propelled itself autonomously above the surface of Mars, before descending in a straight line for a controlled landing.

The first visual indication that the Ingenuity helicopter's test flight was a success came in the form of an altimeter data graph (pictured below), the plateau on the graph indicating the moments in which the aircraft was hovering above the red planet.

The altimeter data showed a total of 39.1 seconds of flight, 30 of which were spent hovering.

Shortly afterwards, an image was revealed of the Ingenuity helicopter's shadow, taken by the aircraft whilst hovering. Video was then downloaded and played at mission control, showing the flight from the perspective of the Mars Perseverance rover.

Ingenuity's custom rotor design propels NASA to new heights

As Mars has only one percent the atmosphere of Earth, the Ingenuity helicopter utilized a custom superlight rotor system with a 1.2-meter (4-foot) wingspan, allowing the 1.8 kg (4lb) aircraft to fly at 2,500 RPM — as a point of reference, helicopters on Earth typically fly at 400-500 RPM.

Perseverance got us to Mars. With Ingenuity, we soar higher.

The #MarsHelicopter made history today by being the first craft to achieve controlled, powered flight on a planet beyond Earth.

— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 19, 2021

The helicopter was piloted autonomously using onboard guidance, navigation, and control systems running algorithms developed and pre-programmed for the test flight by the team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The helicopter flight forms a part of NASA's Mars Perseverance rover mission, paving the way for human flight to the red planet by the 2030s. The rover, with Ingenuity attached, touched down on Mars' Jezero Crater on February 18, after a seven-month journey from Earth.

The aircraft was deployed on April 4th, after which the first test flight was delayed due to an anomaly that required a software update beamed from Earth. Today's flight is the first of five Ingenuity test flights that will be carried out in the coming weeks.

Mars Ingenuity flight location named after Wright Brothers

Following the confirmation of the flight's success and the reveal of the images from Ingenuity and the Perseverance rover, Mimi Aun, project manager at NASA JPL, gave an emotional speech in which she likened the Ingenuity project's first successful test flight to a Wright Brothers moment.

"Wow!"

The @NASAJPL team is all cheers as they receive video data from the @NASAPersevere rover of the Ingenuity #MarsHelicopter flight: pic.twitter.com/8eH4H6jGKs

— NASA (@NASA) April 19, 2021

Shortly afterwards, NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen tweeted that "as an homage to the two innovative bicycle makers from Dayton, this first of many airfields on other worlds will now be known as Wright Brothers Field, in recognition of the ingenuity and innovation that continue to propel exploration."

NASA's stay-at-home team flies Mars helicopter from over a million miles away

During Mimi Aung's speech, following the confirmation of the successful test flight, the NASA project manager also paid tribute to the immense power of data sharing, by reaching out to NASA's enormous remote work team and saying "I'm hugging you [all] virtually" — much of NASA's team had to work from home due to ongoing COVID restrictions.

Prior to the confirmation of the test flight success, Tim Canham, Ingenuity operations lead, explained the complex systems used to beam the data from Mars on NASA TV.

Firstly, Ingenuity communicated with a helicopter base station aboard the Mars Perseverance rover. The rover transmitted the data to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which then beamed the data to NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) satellites. Finally, the DSN relayed the information down to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on Earth, California.

Data from the first Ingenuity flight will now be analyzed in order to help set new parameters for the next test flights, the first of which will occur as early as April 22.

Today's historic flight — which could help to revolutionize future off-world exploration — forms part of an exciting period for NASA, who also recently announced a partnership with SpaceX to help humans land on the moon by 2024.

This was a breaking news story and was updated as new information emerged.