Ingenuity

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was a small aircraft carried to the surface of the Red Planet attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover. Ingenuity’s mission was experimental in nature and completely independent of the rover’s science mission.

Ingenuity was deployed to the surface on April 4, 2021. On April 19, it became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. Flight at Mars is challenging because the Red Planet has a significantly lower gravity – one-third that of Earth’s – and an extremely thin atmosphere with only 1% the pressure at the surface compared to our planet. This means there are relatively few air molecules with which Ingenuity’s two 4-foot-wide (1.2-meter-wide) rotor blades can interact to achieve flight.

The rotorcraft’s flights are autonomous – piloted by onboard guidance, navigation, and control systems running algorithms developed by the team at JPL. Because data must be sent to and returned from the Red Planet over millions of miles using orbiting satellites and NASA’s Deep Space Network, Ingenuity cannot be flown with a joystick, and its flights are not observable from Earth in real time.

To operate at Mars, the rotorcraft requires the Perseverance rover to assist in communications back and forth from Earth.

After its fifth test flight (May 7, 2021), the Ingenuity experiment embarked on a new operations demonstration phase, exploring how aerial scouting and other functions could benefit future exploration of Mars and other worlds. The data from these flights is also being used to help inform decisions relating to considering small helicopters for the role as full standalone science craft carrying instrument payloads. In the distant future, Mars helicopters might even help astronauts explore the Red Planet.

In addition, the rotorcraft’s imagery is being used to directly support the Perseverance rover’s exploration of Jezero Crater. The science team is finding pictures from an aerial perspective beneficial helping assess what geologic features and locations are worthy of exploration, and rover planners are using the same to map out safe routes to get there.

Ingenuity’s team planned for the helicopter to make a short vertical flight on Jan. 18, 2024 to determine its location after executing an emergency landing on its previous flight. Data shows that, as planned, the helicopter achieved a maximum altitude of 40 feet (12 meters) and hovered for 4.5 seconds before starting its descent at a velocity of 3.3 feet per second (1 meter per second).

However, about 3 feet (1 meter) above the surface, Ingenuity lost contact with the rover, which serves as a communications relay for the rotorcraft. The following day, communications were reestablished and more information about the flight was relayed to ground controllers at NASA JPL. Imagery revealing damage to the rotor blade arrived several days later. The cause of the communications dropout and the helicopter’s orientation at time of touchdown are still being investigated.