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It's hard to overstate the significance of the milestone surpassed by NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity.
The small (1.8 kg) helicopter landed with the Perseverance rover in 2021. On January 25, NASA announced that the flying vehicle had to perform an emergency landing, damaging one of its rotors and ending the mission.
This reminds us that space exploration is still difficult. But Ingenuity's three years on Mars proved that powered, controlled flight on Mars was possible.
The little helicopter took much longer than planned and flew higher and further than many expected. In addition to this experiment on Mars, the helicopter's success paves the way for other missions using flying vehicles to explore planets and moons.
The first landings on the moon were static. The year 1969 was probably the biggest year for space exploration, when Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 brought astronauts to the moon's surface, but 1970 was the year for planetary exploration.
In 1970 we had the first soft landing on another planet, Venus. The first robot sample delivered to Earth from the moon. And the first robotic rover to drive around another body (including the moon).
Since then, after more than 50 years of planetary exploration and technological development, there have been only a small number of successful surface missions, and even fewer have been able to travel. Venus was visited by a dozen static landers between 1970 and 1985, and never again.
From robbers to helicopters
Between 1971 and 1976, only three successful landings on Mars were made before the Pathfinder lander and Sojourner rover arrived in 1997. The European Huygens spacecraft then landed on Titan, Saturn's moon, in 2005.
These attempts to reach the surface are rare, extremely difficult, and historically the landers have almost never been mobile. Yet NASA's Mars rovers Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance have all surpassed their designs and traveled further and further.
The story continues
And ingenuity flew.
It was not the first spacecraft to fly. Those would be the balloons deployed by the Soviet Vega 1 and 2 missions, which soared over Venus in 1985. But Ingenuity had control, cameras and connectivity. It took pictures of its rover and of Mars from a completely new perspective. It captured the world's attention and captured our hearts.
In Moscow I had the chance to see models and replicas of the Vega balloons and the first lunar rover. They made a stronger impression on me than the Mars Rover twins used at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. The Soviet missions were bolder and different, dating back generations, before my time and long before my career as a planetary scientist.
Ingenuity was daring, original and completely new. The images he took, of Perseverance, which found technology discarded from the descent module that took it to Mars, and of the bird's-eye views of Mars, were breathtaking. Meanwhile, Perseverance also captured videos of Ingenuity flying through the sky. You had never seen anything like this before.
Future flights
Ingenuity had a rough ride getting there, though. The entire Mars 2020 mission (of Perseverance, Resourcefulness and their transportation systems) was sudden.
After NASA withdrew from the European Space Agency's joint ExoMars program, which included a Mars rover mission, the US space agency began developing one of its own. This rover, later named Perseverance, went from announcement to concept to development and launch in just seven and a half years.
And Ingenuity wasn't initially included on board. The idea was proposed late in the development phase of Mars 2020 and was met with serious opposition. It added complexity, costs, risks and new failure modes. It was also driven by a technical goal, with the possibility of a little outreach - the ability to communicate the science and engineering of the mission to the public - on the side.
Ingenuity was not meant to last. It was designed to prove helicopter flight in the thin atmosphere of Mars. It focused on five short flights over a month. Possible consequences included hard landings, tipping over, loss of power if the solar panels were covered in dust, or loss of communications if it was far from the rover (this happened several times).
But it went far beyond expectations: it survived on the surface of Mars for three years, even during a dusty season, and made 72 flights. Much of the success was made possible by the communications network that now exists on Mars.
Ingenuity receives instructions and sends data to Perseverance, which communicates with a fleet of satellites, including Europe's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, NASA's Maven spacecraft and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These in turn communicate with two deep space networks on Earth, systems of radio antennas around the world that control and track spacecraft.
It took 50 years of planetary exploration to get here, but we can already see the impact on future exploration that Ingenuity's mission is having. The next interplanetary helicopter will be the Dragonfly mission to Saturn's moon Titan.
It will be very different from Ingenuity. It will weigh about a ton and fly with eight rotors. It is a massive vehicle designed to fly in Titan's thick atmosphere.
One of the next Red Planet missions will be Mars Sample Return, which aims to collect sample containers of Martian soil to be prepared and cached by Perseverance. This was intended to be accomplished using a rover, but Ingenuity's success has led to the idea - and now development - of a helicopter to do that.
The future that Ingenuity has opened up for us is exciting. We'll see helicopters on Mars and Venus, more balloons on Venus, swimming vehicles under the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and maybe even a plane or two.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
