This Day, That Year – April 19

This day in history we feature the Ingenuity. The Ingenuity helicopter becomes the first aircraft to achieve flight on another planet on this day in 2021.

Trivia – Ingenuity

Ingenuity, also called Ginny, is a small robotic helicopter operating on Mars. It is part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, along with the Perseverance rover, which landed with Ingenuity attached to its underside on February 18, 2021. The helicopter was deployed to the surface on April 3, 2021. On April 19, it successfully made the first powered controlled extraterrestrial flight by an aircraft, taking off vertically, hovering, and landing for a flight duration of 39.1 seconds. As of its 49th flight on April 2, 2023, the helicopter has been flightworthy for 713 days.

Related read – NASA’s InSight lander detected a meteoroid impact on Mars

Ingenuity was designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in collaboration with AeroVironment, NASA’s Ames Research Center and Langley Research Center. Other prominent contributors were Lockheed Martin Space, Qualcomm, and SolAero. Its rotors measure 4 ft, and its entire body is 49 cm tall. Its rectangular fuselage measures 136 mm × 195 mm × 163 mm, with four landing legs of 384 mm each. It is operated by solar-charged batteries that power dual counter-rotating rotors mounted coaxially one above the other. The helicopter was intended to perform a 30-day technology demonstration, making five flights at altitudes ranging 3–5 m (10–16 ft) for up to 90 seconds each. The expected lateral range was exceeded in the third flight, and the flight duration was exceeded in the fourth. The flights demonstrated the helicopter’s ability to fly in the extremely thin atmosphere of Mars, over a hundred million miles from Earth, without direct human control. Because radio signals take 5 to 20 minutes to travel between Earth and Mars depending on planetary positions, Ingenuity must operate autonomously, performing maneuvers planned, scripted and transmitted to it by JPL. After the brief demonstration phase, JPL began more operational flights, showing how aerial scouting could aid in the exploration of Mars and other worlds. In its operational role, Ingenuity is observing areas of interest for possible examination by Perseverance. The helicopter’s performance and resilience greatly exceeded expectations, enabling it to make flights for the remainder of 2021 and into 2022. In March 2022, NASA announced that it would continue to fly Ingenuity through at least September. The spacecraft arrived on Mars at the Octavia E. Butler Landing site in the 28 mi wide Jezero crater. Before Ingenuity’s first flight, Perseverance drove approximately 100 m away to create a safe flying zone. Flight success was confirmed three hours later by JPL, which livestreamed a view of mission control receiving the data. On its fourth flight, on April 30, 2021, Ingenuity became the first interplanetary spacecraft whose sound was recorded by another interplanetary spacecraft, Perseverance. Ingenuity carries a piece of fabric from the wing of the 1903 Wright Flyer, the Wright Brothers’ airplane used in the first controlled powered heavier-than-air flight on Earth. Ingenuity’s initial take-off and landing area is named Wright Brothers Field as a tribute. Before Ingenuity, the first flight of any kind on a planet beyond Earth was an unpowered balloon flight on Venus by the Soviet Vega 1 spacecraft in 1985.

Source – Wikipedia