“NASA successfully flew its four-pound helicopter from the surface of Mars early Monday, the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet, a feat NASA officials compared to the Wright brothers first flight in 1903. At about 3:30 a.m., the twin, carbon-fiber rotor blades began spinning furiously, and the chopper, called Ingenuity, lifted off the surface of the Red Planet, reaching an altitude of about 10-feet, where it hovered, turned and landed softly in an autonomous flight that lasted just 30 seconds. Inside the flight operations center at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, engineers broke into applause when confirmation of the flight arrived in a data burst that took about three hours to travel the 178 million miles from Mars to Earth.”

“The atmosphere in the room turned almost giddy when a still photo shot from the helicopter captured its shadow on the ground, followed by video of the aircraft’s flight, captured by the nearby Mars rover. Scientists say the successful test could eventually help the space agency more quickly roam across Mars as it looks for signs of ancient life. To make the brief flight, Ingenuity’s technology had to overcome Mars’s super-thin atmosphere – just 1 percent the density of Earth’s – which makes it more difficult for the helicopters’ blades, spinning at about 2,500 revolutions per minute, to gain the purchase they need to pull the vehicle into the air. It was a triumphant add-on to the main part of NASA’s latest Mars mission – the Perseverance rover, a car-sized vehicle that is set to explore a crater that once held water and could yield clues to the history of the planet and whether life ever existed there.” – Washington Post.