This year, NASA's "Ingenuity" aircraft made history when it became the first drone to take-off, fly, and land in the atmosphere of another planet.
Anderson Cooper: It s done if the parachute doesn t work.
Al Chen: That s right. You know, no one wants to be that the guy the drops the baton.
No landing by a spacecraft has ever been recorded as well as this one. There were six cameras capturing it all from different angles. The parachute deployed. Then the heat shield fell away like a lens cap, and Perseverance got its first look at the ground. This is not a simulation. This is what it looks like to parachute onto Mars.
Anderson Cooper: How fast is it moving at this point?
Al Chen: Yeah, we re still going about 350 miles an hour, and still slowing down
By Steve Gregory, KFI News
May 21, 2021
Photo Credit: Steve Gregory
Some engineers in Simi Valley have shown off their contributions to the Mars Ingenuity Helicopter. KFI s Steve Gregory was there.
The work done by AeroVironment represents a pretty big chunk of the design of the interplanetary aircraft. What percentage of Ingenuity were you responsible for? Well, that s a good question. You know, it was a big team effort. Everybody worked on a lot of different parts, you know, big team effort.
Can you tell that s a bit of a sensitive question? All we can say is what we built and what we didn t build and what we worked with them together on it and but the rotor system was the main thing this is the the rotor blades, the motors, the actuators, the swash plates, the central mast, the backer for the solar array, and then the landing gear, support plate, those hinges you saw and then the landing legs themselves.
AeroVironment helicopter takes flight in Moorpark facility.
Engineers at AeroVironment Inc. showed off on Thursday the company’s terrestrial version of the helicopter it developed for NASA’s mission to Mars.
Nicknamed Terry, the terrestrial aircraft was flown for members of the media by Matt Keennon, the technical lead for rotor system development on the Mars Ingenuity helicopter program at the Moorpark facility of the Simi Valley unmanned aircraft manufacturer.
Ben Pipenberg, engineering lead on the helicopter program, explained before the flight that Terry has an airframe identical to Ingenuity and that structure composites and mechanism were built from the same molds as the Mars version.
Simi Valley firm shows off earthly twin of NASA s Mars helicopter
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The Simi Valley firm that helped create NASA s tiny Ingenuity helicopter now buzzing around Mars has been enjoying the afterglow of a successful mission.
On Sunday night, CBS long-running news show 60 Minutes featured a segment on the space agency s current Mars adventure that included a visit by Anderson Cooper to Ventura County s AeroVironment Inc. Cooper witnessed the company s first external demonstration of its latest contraption: a twin of the Mars helicopter that operates on Earth.
Ingenuity blasted off in July with NASA s Perseverance rover and landed in a Martian crater in February. On April 19, Ingenuity whirred above ground for nearly 40 seconds, making it the first aircraft to fly on another planet.