Nasa's robot helicopter makes Mars flight

LOS ANGELES • Nasa's miniature robot helicopter Ingenuity performed a successful take-off and landing on Mars early yesterday, achieving the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft over the surface of another planet, the US space agency said.

The twin-rotor whirligig's debut on the Red Planet marked a 21st-century Wright Brothers moment for Nasa, or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which said success could pave the way for new modes of exploration on Mars and other destinations in the solar system, such as Venus and Saturn's moon Titan.

Mission managers at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles burst into applause and cheers as engineering data beamed back from Mars confirmed that the 1.8kg solar-powered helicopter had performed its maiden 40-second flight precisely as planned three hours earlier.

The robot rotorcraft was programmed to ascend 3m straight up, then hover and rotate in place over the Martian surface for half a minute before settling back down on its four legs.

During Nasa's presentation of the event livestreamed from JPL headquarters, mission managers also displayed the first images from the flight.

A black-and-white photo taken by a downward-pointing onboard camera while the helicopter was aloft showed the distinct shadow cast by Ingenuity in the Martian sunlight onto the ground just below it.

And a snippet of colour video footage captured by a separate camera mounted on Nasa's Mars rover Perseverance, parked about 60m away, showed the helicopter in flight against the orange-coloured landscape surrounding it.

"We can now say that human beings have flown an aircraft on another planet," said Dr MiMi Aung, Ingenuity project manager at JPL.

Despite the flight's brevity, it marked a historic feat in interplanetary aviation, taking place on an "air field" 278 million km from Earth on the floor of a vast Martian basin called Jezero Crater.

Nasa likened the achievement to the Wright Brothers' first controlled flight of their motor-driven airplane near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903 - a take-off and landing that covered just 37m in 12 seconds.

Paying tribute to that modest but monumental first flight, Nasa engineers affixed a tiny swathe of wing fabric from the original Wright flyer under Ingenuity's solar panel before sending it to Mars. The tiny rotorcraft was carried to the Red Planet strapped to the belly of the Mars rover Perseverance, a six-wheeled astrobiology lab that touched down in Jezero Crater on Feb 18 after a nearly seven-month journey through space.

Ingenuity was developed as a technology demonstration, separate from Perseverance's primary mission to search for traces of ancient micro-organisms and collect samples of Martian rock for eventual return to Earth for further analysis.

With the helicopter's first outing deemed a success, Nasa plans to send the aircraft on several additional, progressively more ambitious flights in the weeks ahead.

The small, lightweight aircraft had to withstand punishing cold, with nighttime temperatures dropping as low as minus 90 deg C, using solar power alone to recharge and keep its internal components properly heated.

The planned flight was delayed for a week by a technical glitch during a test spin of the aircraft's rotors on April 9. But Nasa said it resolved that issue by transmitting a few additional commands to its flight sequence last week.

REUTERS