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| Image Credit: NASA.gov |
On April 19, Ingenuity took to the skies for the first time, becoming the first motorized vessel to fly on another planet.
United States of America, Washington: The plane was only intended to take off five times. Despite the fact that NASA's Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, has completed 12 flights, it isn't ready to retire.
The US space agency has extended Ingenuity's mission indefinitely due to its astonishing and unexpected achievement.
The rover Perseverance's primary objective is to look for clues of ancient life on Mars, and the little helicopter has become a regular journey companion.
Josh Ravich, the head of Ingenuity's mechanical engineering team, remarked, "Everything is operating so wonderfully." On the surface, we're performing better than we expected.
Hundreds of individuals worked on the project, but only about a dozen are still involved on a daily basis.
Ravich has been a member of the team for five years.
"I guess I had the same reaction as everyone else when I had the opportunity to work on the helicopter project: 'Is that possibly possible?'"
His skepticism was understandable at first: The density of the air on Mars is only one percent that of Earth's atmosphere. Flying a helicopter on Mars, by comparison, would be like flying in the thin air about 20 miles (30 kilometers) above Earth.
It wasn't easy to travel to Mars in the first place, either. The rover's ingenuity had to weather the initial shock of taking off from Earth, as well as the shock of landing on Mars on February 18 after a seven-month journey through space tethered to the rover's belly.
The tiny (four pound, or 1.8 kilogram) copter has had to adapt to its new environment, surviving the freezing cold of Martian nights by collecting heat from the solar panels that charge its batteries during the day. Its missions are also guided by a variety of sensors, although real-time guiding is impractical due to the 15-minute lag in communications from Earth.
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