The brief test of the experimental vehicle called Ingenuity shows how explorers can study the red planet from the sky as well as the ground.
A small robotic helicopter named Ingenuity made space exploration history on Monday when it lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered in the wispy air of the red planet. It was the first machine from Earth ever to fly like an airplane or a helicopter on another world.
The achievement extends NASA’s long, exceptional record of firsts on Mars.
“We together flew at Mars,” MiMi Aung, the project manager for Ingenuity, said to her team during the celebration. “And we together now have this Wright brothers moment.”
Like the first flight of an airplane by Wilbur and Orville Wright in 1903, the flight did not go far or last long, but it showed what could be done. Flying in the thin atmosphere of Mars was a particularly tricky technical endeavor, on the edge of impossible because there is almost no air to push against. NASA engineers employed ultralight materials, fast-spinning blades and high-powered computer processing to get Ingenuity off the ground and keep it from veering off and crashing.
And just as the Wright plane led to a transformation in how people and goods zip around Earth, Ingenuity offers a new mode of transportation that NASA can now use as it studies the solar system’s mysteries. Future robotic explorers, with this technology under the agency’s belt, may take new, unconventional shapes.
“What the ingenuity team has done,” said Michael Watkins, the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where the helicopter was built, during a news conference, “is given us the third dimension. They freed us from the surface now and forever in planetary exploration.”
Ingenuity was also something different for NASA — a high-risk, high-reward project with a modest price tag where failure was an acceptable outcome.
That approach is more similar to that of nimble space companies like SpaceX than large traditional development programs that work through every possible contingency to build a full-scale machine that has to work the first time.
Ingenuity was thus a small experiment tacked onto NASA’s Mars rover, Perseverance but it has the potential for a paradigm-breaking advance.
Perhaps a more advanced helicopter could serve as a scout for a future rover, identifying intriguing locations for closer study and safe routes for the rover to drive there. Or swarms of helicopters could zip up and down cliff faces to examine layers of rock that are too far away or out of view of current spacecraft.
There are no current plans to put a second helicopter on Mars. But Bob Balaram, the chief engineer of Ingenuity, said he and colleagues had begun sketching out designs for a larger Mars helicopter with about 10 times the mass and capable of carrying some 10 pounds of science equipment.
“That would be, I think, the good sweet spot for the next-generation design,” Dr. Balaram said.
On Sunday, mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California radioed the commands for the test to Perseverance, which landed on Mars in February. Perseverance in turn relayed the commands to Ingenuity, which was sitting 200 feet away on flat terrain that was chosen to serve as the airstrip for a series of five test flights.
At 3:34 a.m. Eastern time — it was the middle of the Martian day, half an hour past noon — the helicopter spun up its rotors as it had been commanded and rose above Jezero crater, into the Martian sky.
At the surface of Mars, the atmosphere is just 1/100th as dense as Earth’s, not much for helicopter blades to push against. Thus, to generate enough lift for the four-pound Ingenuity to rise up, its two rotors, each about four feet wide, had to spin in opposite directions at more than 2,500 revolutions a minute.
It hovered at a height of some 10 feet for about 30 seconds. Then it descended back to the surface.
But at that moment, no one on Earth — including people at NASA — knew what was actually happening. The two spacecraft were not in communication with Earth during the test, and Ingenuity had to perform all of its actions autonomously.
It was only three hours later that one of NASA’s other Mars spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, passed overhead, and Perseverance could relay the test data back to Earth.
Minutes later, engineers analyzed the results that showed a successful flight.
Havard Grip, the engineer who serves as NASA’s chief pilot for Ingenuity, announced that the data confirmed “the first powered flight of a powered aircraft on another planet.”
NASA officials said they have named the airstrip where Ingenuity took off and landed Wright Brothers Field. A small piece of fabric from the original Wright airplane was glued to Ingenuity and sent to Mars.
Ms. Aung told her team to celebrate the moment, “and then after that, let’s get back to work and more flights,” she said.
With the first trip’s success, up to four more flights could be attempted. The first three, including Monday’s, are designed to test basic abilities of the helicopter. The second, which could occur as soon as Thursday, is to rise to an altitude of 16 feet and then travel horizontally about 50 feet before returning to its original location.
The third flight could fly a distance of 160 feet and then return. Mr. Grip said the team had not decided on plans for the final two flights. “What we’re talking about here is going higher, going further, going faster, stretching the capabilities of the helicopter in those ways,” he said.
Ms. Aung said she thought Ingenuity would squeeze in the remaining four flights over the next two weeks. She also wanted to push Ingenuity to its limits and for the last flight to travel 600 or 700 meters — or up to 2,300 feet.
“I’m being more cautious here,” Dr. Grip responded, a bit hesitantly.
NASA plans to wrap up the tests within 30 Martian days of when Ingenuity was dropped off on April 3 so that Perseverance can commence the main portion of its $2.7 billion mission. Ingenuity was an $85 million nice-to-have, add-on project, but not a core requirement for the success of Perseverance.
The looser requirements of a technology demonstration allowed the engineers to use an almost off-the-shelf Qualcomm processor that was originally developed for cellphones with more computing power than all previous interplanetary spacecraft combined.
The processor, which was not adapted for the harsh conditions of space, was more susceptible to disruptions of radiation, but the helicopter needed all of that number-crunching speed to maintain steady flight.