Image: NASA
Faizel Patel – 20/04/2021
NASA has successfully flown a small helicopter on Mars becoming the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another world.
The drone, called Ingenuity, was airborne for less than a minute with confirmation of the flight coming via a satellite at Mars which relayed the chopper’s data back to Earth.
The space agency is promising more adventurous flights in the day’s ahead.
Ingenuity will be commanded to fly higher and further as engineers seek to test the limits of the technology.
Getting airborne on the Red Planet is not easy.
The atmosphere is very thin, just 1% of the density here at Earth which gives the blades on a rotor craft very little to bite into to gain lift.
Ingenuity was therefore made extremely light and given the power to turn those blades extremely fast – at over 2,500 revolutions per minute.
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