In a quote that has since gone viral, Håvard Grip, Ingenuity’s chief pilot at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California described the development efforts, “The Wright Brothers showed that powered flight in Earth’s atmosphere was possible, using an experimental aircraft. With Ingenuity, we’re trying to do the same for Mars.”
“We as human beings have never flown or rotorcraft outside of our own Earth’s atmosphere, so this will actually be a very much a Wright Brothers moment, except on another planet,” Mimi Aung, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter project manager, said in a news conference on last Tuesday.
While NASA and other space agencies around the world have sent landers, orbiters, and rovers to the Red Planet, no one has attempted to fly an aircraft on another planet before. The atmosphere on Mars poses unique challenges to powered flight.
“Flying a rotorcraft at Mars is very difficult. First and foremost, the atmosphere there is very thin, about 1% compared to the Earth’s atmospheric density here,” Aung said. “To build a vehicle that can fly at Mars, it has to be very light and be able to spin very fast.”
