Left: flight-related camera imagery. Right: an artist’s depiction of Ingenuity. NASA/JPL-Caltech; the rendered side view is not a camera following the aircraft. Source.
On April 19, 2021, NASA successfully flew a small helicopter on Mars, the first time a helicopter has ever flown on a planet other than Earth.
The 'Ingenuity' drone took off from the Martian surface after being deployed by NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed in the Jezero Crater on the Red Planet in February 2021. The flight lasted less than 40 seconds and took the helicopter around 3m into the thin Martian atmosphere.
The thin atmosphere makes it much harder to fly a helicopter compared to Earth, as there is less for the rotor blades to push against.
Perseverance was sent to search for possible signs of ancient microbial life; Ingenuity was a separate technology demonstration of flight in the Martian atmosphere.
MiMi Aung, project manager for Ingenuity at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told the BBC:
"We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet. We've been talking for so long about our 'Wright Brothers moment' on Mars, and here it is."
When asked if she was surprised the helicopter worked, Aung said:
"No, I'm not. We really had nailed the equations, the models and the verification here on Earth in our laboratory tests. So, it then became a question of: have we chosen the right materials to build Ingenuity, to survive the space environment, to survive the Mars environment?"
The small light drone was equipped to take black-and-white navigation images and colour photographs of Mars as it travels from place to place, powered by its 350 watt battery engine. It is hoped that the use of the helicopter could revolutionise how we explore distant worlds in the years to come.
Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, the head of science at NASA, went on to say just how useful the helicopter will be for exploring the red planet. He said:
"It's really taking a tool that we haven't been able to use before and putting it in the box of tools that is available for all of our missions going forward at Mars. So for me, it's really exciting personally and for the community overall it opens up new doors. We will be able to explore areas where we cannot use a rover. Some of these crater walls, for example, are so exciting; scientists have been writing papers about them."
NASA’s separate Dragonfly mission was planned to explore Saturn’s moon Titan using a rotorcraft. Its evolving launch and arrival schedule should be checked in the mission record rather than inferred from this 2021 report.
[h/t: BBC]
Five planned flights became seventy-two
NASA designed Ingenuity as a short technology demonstration, initially planning no more than five test flights. The helicopter went on to complete 72 flights across nearly three years, moving beyond its first tests into an operational role that included aerial scouting.
Its final flight took place on January 18, 2024. Damage to the rotor blades ended its ability to fly, and NASA announced the conclusion of flight operations later that month. The Ingenuity mission record now documents the complete flight history, rather than leaving the aircraft permanently at the moment of its debut.
Why flying on Mars was a challenge
The Martian atmosphere is far thinner than Earth’s. Generating lift under those conditions required a very light aircraft and rapidly rotating blades. The helicopter also had to operate through cold nights and communicate across a vast distance.
Engineers on Earth could plan a flight, but they could not steer it with a live joystick. Radio signals take time to travel between the planets. Ingenuity therefore carried out flight commands using onboard control and navigation.
A view the rover could not provide
An airborne camera changes the geometry of exploration. It can look across terrain and around obstacles from a different position than a rover’s mast. That does not make a helicopter a replacement for a rover, which can examine rocks closely and carry much heavier instruments.
The two platforms answer different needs. Ingenuity showed that a small aerial companion could add useful information while its own flights continued to teach engineers about the environment.
A final landing is part of the result
Technology demonstrations are valuable because they expose real limits as well as successes. The end of the flight campaign belongs in the story, alongside the remarkable expansion from the original plan.
When watching a Mars helicopter animation, distinguish it from actual imagery. A rendered side view can explain how flight works; the downward-looking flight camera and images from Perseverance record real observations.
For another completed Mars experiment, explore MOXIE’s oxygen-production results. And for a very different future flying mission, read about Dragonfly’s planned exploration of Titan. Titan’s atmosphere creates a different engineering problem, so its aircraft is not simply an enlarged Ingenuity.
Additional source and image references: A helicopter shadow on Martian ground beside an illustration of Ingenuity in flight
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