![]() ![]() The final product sports two stacked rotors featuring blades roughly four feet in diameter that spin in opposite directions at 2,400 revolutions per minute.īut generating enough lift wasn’t the team’s only concern. To generate enough lift, Aung and a team of engineers led by JPL’s Bob Balaram had to redesign traditional rotorcraft down to the very shape and material of the rotor blades, while also dramatically cranking up how fast those blades spin. “You can’t just scale a helicopter designed to fly on Earth and expect it to work on Mars,” says MiMi Aung, the project’s manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). But on Mars the air is just one percent the density of Earth’s-so thin that flying there is the equivalent of trying to take off at 100,000 feet. If the Wright Brothers comparison seems overwrought, consider the following: no helicopter has ever flown higher than around 40,000 feet on our planet. ![]() If all goes well, Ingenuity will usher in a new era of exploration of Mars’ rugged terrain-going where rovers can’t and giving some of the planet’s treacherous features, such as its huge lava tubes, a closer inspection. The helicopter is what’s known as a technology demonstration, which means that successfully showing its capabilities in a series of test flights is its only mission. The pint-sized helicopter is currently strapped to the underside of NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is rocketing towards the Red Planet with an expected arrival date of February 18. Ingenuity, a four-pound helicopter, will attempt the first ever flight in another planet’s atmosphere when it reaches Mars. Now, NASA is set to prove that it can happen on another planet. It’s been nearly 120 years since the Wright Brothers proved that controlled, powered flight was possible on Earth. ![]()
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