“We’ll work up to 300 meters downrange and to 90-second flights,” Jurczyk says. The altitude and distance of each flight will grow steadily greater and the airborne maneuvers more complex. It is scheduled to make four more flights over the course of the next month-all from a site NASA has now given the playful airport designation JZRO, for Jezero. This first brief flight will by no means be Ingenuity’s only one. The machine’s light weight combined with Mars’s relatively lower gravity-just 38% that of Earth-made the fall an easily survivable one. Merely unstowing the helicopter from the rover and lowering it to the surface was a six-day, multi-step job that involved activating a bolt-breaking device, firing a cable-cutting pyrotechnic, rotating Ingenuity to its upright position, extending its four legs, and finally dropping it the final 13 cm (5 in.) to the ground. At the heart of all MARSS solutions is our AI-powered Internet of Things (IoT) platform, NiDAR Core. That degree of caution was in keeping with the entire go-slow way Ingenuity has been handled from the start. MARSS is a technology company protecting millions of lives across the globe. For the record, Ingenuity’s total time aloft was more than three times the duration of the Wrights’ 12 seconds. It was the first flight of a powered aircraft on another planet, coming 118 years after the Wright Brothers achieved the same feat on Earth. Mars Une trentaine de secondes pour l’Histoire : l’hélicoptère Ingenuity tente de voler sur Mars ce lundi Le premier vol d’un engin motorisé sur une autre planète, qui avait été repoussé, pourrait.

And then there’s the tenuous Martian atmosphere-just 1% the density of Earth’s, making it awfully hard for rotating blades to get any bite at all.īut flying a helicopter on Mars is precisely what NASA did today, when the little Ingenuity drone lifted off from the floor of Jezero Crater at 3:34 AM EDT (just after noon, Mars time), hovered at an altitude of 3 m (10 ft) for 40 seconds, and touched gently back down, kicking up a plume of rusty red dust. There’s the remoteness too Mars is currently 287 million km (178 million mi.) from Earth, meaning that radio signals, even moving at light speed, take nearly 16 minutes to travel just one way between the two worlds. There’s the temperature, for one thing-a paralyzing -90º C (-130º F), frigid enough to cause nearly any machinery to freeze up and lock. Mars is a lousy place to try to fly a helicopter.

Mars drone