A piece of Ohio landed on Mars Monday when NASA gave the name of the Wright Brothers to a dusty plain where for the first time, a powered vehicle broke the hold of Martian gravity, rose 10 feet, hovered and safely came back to rest.
Mere hours after Monday’s successful test of the helicopter named Ingenuity, NASA Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen christened the ground Wright Brothers Field for the Dayton inventors who first flew a powered aircraft Dec. 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
“Now, 117 years after the Wright brothers succeeded in making the first flight on our planet, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has succeeded in performing this amazing feat on another world,” Zurbuchen said.
Wright brothers plane patch travels 300 million miles to Mars aboard Perseverance rover
msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Small piece of Wright brothers 1st aircraft to fly again on Mars
fox13news.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from fox13news.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Tweet
Perseverance, NASA’s latest rover to head to Mars, landed successfully on the Red Planet about 3:55 Eastern on Thursday, ushering in a new era of Mars exploration for the space agency. Perseverance, which launched in July 2020, carries a lot more scientific equipment and instruments than its sibling Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012. Included in that equipment is a way of collecting samples to be sent back to Earth, as well as a Mars first: A helicopter!
The aerial acrobatics performed by the rover during landing included a super-sonic dive through the atmosphere, the deployment of the largest supersonic parachute to ever be deployed on another planet, the use of radar to determine an appropriate landing spot, a rocket-powered-descent to just over the surface (after disconnecting from the parachute), and a perilous sky crane final twenty-meter drop from the rocket platform to the surface of the planet. After Percy (a nickname given the rover) touches down, the