Yesterday, the Ingenuity helicopter conducted its first flight on planet Mars. The duration was only 40 seconds and it reached an altitude of just over 3 meters but it was important to lift off the ground this drone built to test the technologies needed to fly a vehicle in the Martian atmosphere, which is very thin. The flight was autonomous, pre-scheduled, and initiated by a command launched from Earth. The images, along with telemetry data, were transmitted to the Mars Rover Perseverance mission control center.

Arrived on Mars on February 18, 2021, together with the Mars Rover Perseverance, the Ingenuity helicopter, formally called the Mars Helicopter Scout, was released to the Martian surface on April 3 after spending the first few weeks anchored to Perseverance. At that point, the various procedures began to test its onboard systems, both hardware and software, not without problems.

First, however, the Ingenuity helicopter showed that it can withstand the environmental conditions existing on Mars, where temperatures can drop as low as -90° Celsius during the night. Any flaw or damage reported during landing in its insulation and heating systems could have damaged Ingenuity’s electrical components or its lithium-ion batteries dooming it before it even tried to fly.

A rotor test of the Ingenuity helicopter was conducted on April 9, but the control system stopped it. Identifying and solving a problem millions of kilometers away is certainly not easy and took a few days. Thankfully, an update to the software that runs Ingenuity was enough to fix it.

This problem delayed the first flight test but in the end, it was conducted yesterday. The Ingenuity helicopter managed to fly into the thin Martian atmosphere and took a photo of its own shadow while the Mars Rover Perseverance recorded the flight.

Before the Ingenuity helicopter, the systems called SkyCrane that helped the landing of the Mars Rovers Curiosity and Perseverance conducted maneuvers similar to a flight, but Ingenuity is a vehicle designed for real flight, from take-off to landing. Yesterday, Ingenuity soared to just over 3 meters for 40 seconds. It seems little but it’s a longer flight than the first flight of an aircraft made by the Wright brothers. It’s no coincidence that the area of Ingenuity’s flight was named “Wright Brothers Field” and that the success of the first flight on another planet, albeit modest, aroused enthusiasm at NASA.

The software that runs the helicopter is based on the Linux operating system and includes other free / open source software such as SciPy and the F’ (F Prime) framework. Thousands of developers can be proud that the product of their efforts has even reached Mars.

For NASA, it was important to prove that a helicopter can fly even in the very thin atmosphere of Mars. After examining the data of this flight, it will be possible to program slightly longer flights with horizontal movements to assess the possibilities of Ingenuity even more in depth.

NASA has released a video of the flight of the Ingenuity helicopter taken by the Mars Rover Perseverance.