Chris Davies - Apr 19, 2021, 8:28am CDT
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter successfully took off from the surface of the red planet, hovered, and then landed safely again today, the first example of powered, controlled flight on another planet. The historic experiment is the culmination of a wild ride for Ingenuity, tucked against the belly of the Mars Perseverance rover until it was carefully lowered to the planet’s surface earlier this month.
While Perseverance is expected to spend the next few years exploring Jezero Crater where it landed, performing science experiments and collecting samples for future return to Earth, Ingenuity has a very different goal. It saw NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory attempt something never before tried, controlled flight on another planet in our Solar System.