La NASA pilotera un avion sur une autre planète pour la première fois

When the Perseverance rover landed on Mars, there was a stowaway stuck to its underside: a small helicopter called Ingenuity. The helicopter now sits on the surface of the planet, and NASA could attempt to fly it as early as April 11. If all goes well, it will be the first time in history humans have flown an aircraft on an extraterrestrial world. 

Ingenuity has four legs, two pairs of blades that can spin at 40 rotations per second, a small solar panel array, and weighs about 4 pounds. When NASA elected to send a helicopter to Mars as part of the Perseverance mission, it spent months testing out whether it would be possible to fly one in an atmosphere that’s about 100 times thinner than Earth’s, and a gravity that’s only one-third as powerful as Earth’s. Those tests went well, and the agency settled on a lightweight, $85 million design for a drone that should have a realistic chance of actually getting into the air for a stable flight.

The first flight will be a 30-second hover about 3 meters off the ground, in which the helicopter will rotate in place before landing. Its cameras will take about 30 images per second, and other sensors will track things like changes in wind conditions. 

If the first flight goes well, NASA will proceed to fly Ingenuity over a series of progressively more audacious flights over the next 31 days, no higher than 5 meters in altitude. There could be a total of five flights.

Ingenuity won’t be doing any science, it’s more just to show that helicopters can work on other planets. But it could be a big moment for the future of space exploration. Rovers are a neat way to investigate conditions on the surface of another world, but they won’t be able to work everywhere. If there are planets and moons where the surface is hazardous, or a world that’s dominated by lakes and oceans, an aerial drone would be a much safer and efficient way to explore them.

Should the flight take place on April 11 as planned, we’ll have data and images back the following day. Stay tuned.