The NASA Team in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California celebrated one year since the helicopter of his ingenuity became the first plane to reach controlled and powerful flights on other planets.
Maiden Ingenuity flights took place on April 19, 2021, and the team marked the opportunity by sharing videos that showed a special moment 12 months ago when news came through a plane like the drone had successfully displayed the first flight to break the record:The team spent years designing, building and testing a 4-pound helicopter, 19 inches height before tying it to the abdomen of perseverance and sending it to the red planet.
After reaching Mars in February 2021, ingenuity made his first flight a few months later, taking into the sky Mars in ARMA low altitude lasting 39 seconds. One of the persistence cameras captures historic moments:The flight is important because it proves that ingenuity can handle a super thin atmosphere of Mars, which is 100 times thinner than the earth. It also inspires the inspiration to consider a more complex design for future rotorcraft that can be used to help the upcoming mission to Mars.
Within 12 months since its first flights, ingenuity had completed more complex flights, past a total of 46 minutes in the air and traveled 3.6 miles (5.8 kilometers) in 25 separate missions.The latest aircraft flight, which took place on April 8, saw it set a record speed of 12.3 mph (5.5 meters per second) while covering a 708.4 meter record distance.The longest time in the air for one flight was 169.5 seconds, recorded on a mission last summer.
Doing far beyond expectations, the team in JPL transists the ingenuity of technological demonstration projects into the operating demonstration phase after only four flights, a movement that paves the way for helicopters to help perseverance in exploration of remote planets such as the evidence of ancient microbial life.
Since then, the plane has used an onboard camera to photograph Medan to help the JPL team plan a safe and efficient route for perseverance to take between interesting locations.But as you would expect with a new piece of kit, it wasn’t all smoothly for ingenuity and the team had to overcome some technical problems along the way. His ability to overcome these problems from millions of miles away to send ingenuity into the sky again and again is an extraordinary sign of helicopter design and impressive skills engineer.In the future, the team will be interested in encouraging ingenuity to its limits while maintaining the security of the engine, so expect news about flights that are even more challenging in the coming months.