NASA films rare footage of its Mars helicopter flying and landing
NASA films rare footage of its Mars helicopter flying and landing
The aerial robot scouts the Red Planet.
Am I the only one who wishes this post was just the video in question rather than an entire news article about it with a broken video player.
Flight starts @1:19
Here's some videos: https://youtu.be/JGKRoOO6Pds
I've always been amazed those small blades can make enough lift in the thin martian atmosphere
Here's a picture of a to-scale model to emphasize what the other comment is saying - Ingenuity isn't that small, and also remember that Mars' surface gravity is only about 40% of Earth's.
The blades total length are 1.2m. Not that small really.
~5x faster rpm than a similarly sized rotor could reach on earth.
Of course it's rare, how many helicopters are there on Mars?
This is so cool when you think about it.
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Is this the first flight of this drone? Or just a random one?
Here's the great site about it's mission and stats!
This was its Ingenuity's 55th flight, originally the goal was to get "up to" 5 demo flights!
With its tech demo complete, Ingenuity transitions to a new operations demonstration phase to explore how future rovers and aerial explorers can work together.
aka, we never expected to get this many flights, without killing it, and we've run out of ideas for it. "Hey, Perseverance want to see some tricks?"
