NASA employees had a moonshot idea as they were building the Perseverance rover: What if it carried a little helicopter to Mars?
Engineers didn’t know if a helicopter would work on Mars. It would be hard to lift off in air with 1% the density of Earth’s atmosphere. That’s the equivalent of flying at three times the height of Mount Everest. But NASA hoped to prove it was possible through a technology demonstration.
NASA engineers built a little rotorcraft called Ingenuity, then packed it into the last available space in Perseverance’s belly. The engineers weren’t sure that Ingenuity would even survive its first night on the cold Martian surface. They also feared it wouldn’t fly when they gave the command, or that it would crash during one of its five planned flights.
But Ingenuity dispelled those fears time and again. On Saturday, the tissue-box-sized drone completed its 15th flight.
NASA is still processing data from the latest aerial escapade. But if the flight went according to plan, that would mean Ingenuity rose nearly 40 feet into the air, then zipped over 1,332 feet of Martian ground in just under 129 seconds.
Read more: yahoo
