NASA's Ingenuity helicopter took flight on Mars for the first time on Monday — and the Perseverance rover captured the entire feat in sharp video. The rover, which carried Ingenuity almost 300 million miles to Mars, perched on an overlook 211 feet away and watched the historic flight take place at 3:34 a.m. ET. In the video below, you can see Ingenuity begin to spin its rotors, get them up to full speed (five times faster than an Earth helicopter's rotors), and then lift itself 10 feet above the Martian surface. After that, it hovers, pivots toward Perseverance, and lowers itself gently back into the dust. The entire flight lasted about 40 seconds.
This was the first powered controlled flight ever conducted on another planet — NASA's "Wright brothers moment," as agency officials call it. "From everything we've seen so far, it was a flawless flight," Håvard Grip, the helicopter's chief pilot, said in the briefing. "It was a gentle takeoff. At altitude, it gets pushed around a little bit by the wind, but it really maintains station very well, and it stuck the landing right in the place where it was supposed to go." Ingenuity is a technology-demonstration mission — it won't conduct any science. But now that NASA has shown that the rotorcraft technology works, future space helicopters could explore canyons, caves, and rocky fields that are too dangerous for rovers. Mars drones could even do reconnaissance for future astronauts.
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https://www.businessinsider.com/video-perseverance-rover-nasa-helicopter-ingenuity-first-mars-flight-2021-4
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