FIRST FLIGHT ON ANOTHER WORLD
The event compares to the first flight by the Wright brothers, today, NASA’s helicopter INGENUITY has for the first time flown above Mars. INGENUITY’s take off today from the martian surface has made space exploration history. The small robotic helicopter was designed to take into account the atmosphere of Mars which is just 1/100th as dense as Earth’s. Taking off from the surface of Mars is comparable to flying at an altitude of 100,000 feet on earth, which no helicopter has ever done, the flight height is equivalent to two times the flying altitude of a jetliner. This is the first flight on Mars, which will surely be only the beginning of many in the future, which will allow a better understanding of the red planet, and enable researches to discover more about the surface, atmosphere and weather.
Read more about NASA’s Mars helicopter first flight on another world:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/science/nasa-mars-helicopter.html?referringSource=articleShare
Photo credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Asu/via Reuters