NASA "Historic First Space Helicopter 'Ingenuity' Successfully Flies on Mars"

[Image source=Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Yuri Kim] NASA's space helicopter Ingenuity successfully flew in the Martian sky on the 19th (local time). This is the first case of humanity flying a "controlled powered vehicle" on a planet other than Earth.

NASA announced that Ingenuity succeeded in its flight on that day. The flight attempt took place at 3:30 a.m. (Eastern Time, 4:30 p.m. Korean time). However, it took about three hours to organize the flight data and send it back to Earth, so the success of the flight was announced after that time.

The test flight reportedly involved taking off, ascending to about 3 meters at a speed of 1 meter per second, hovering for 30 seconds, and then landing. Immediately after the flight, Ingenuity is presumed to have entered a resting state to recharge its consumed power using solar energy.

The atmosphere of Mars is known to be only about 1% of Earth's atmospheric density, making it a challenging environment even to attempt flight. Therefore, NASA developed Ingenuity, a helicopter designed to be as lightweight as possible to lift off in the thin atmosphere. Ingenuity is approximately 49 cm tall and weighs 1.8 kg on Earth, but due to Mars' gravity being one-third of Earth's, it weighs 0.68 kg there. Its four carbon fiber blades are designed to rotate at about 2,400 revolutions per minute, roughly eight times faster than typical helicopters. Ingenuity was originally scheduled for its first flight mission on the 11th, but the flight was temporarily postponed due to an issue with the rotor speed discovered during pre-flight testing.

NASA spent $85 million (approximately 95.03 billion KRW) to build Ingenuity. The rover Perseverance, which carried Ingenuity to Mars, cost $2.7 billion (about 3 trillion KRW) to develop.

Ingenuity is equipped with two cameras. One is a black-and-white camera mounted on the bottom used to verify ground position and navigate the route, and the other is a high-resolution camera mounted on the front that takes pictures of the surrounding landscape and transmits them to NASA.

NASA described the significance of this flight mission as "the moment of the Wright brothers' first flight," emphasizing it as a very important moment in the history of human space exploration. To symbolize this significance, NASA attached a piece of the wing from the Wright brothers' airplane to the actual Ingenuity helicopter.

Harvard Grip, who leads the Ingenuity flight mission, said, "If flight on Mars is successful, it will enable free exploration without terrain constraints," adding, "This is a significant advancement for future Mars exploration missions."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.