Arrived on Mars weeks ago with the powerful Nasa Perseverance rover, on his belly to be precise like a kangaroo pouch, he then detached and spent several days charging the batteries via solar cells, testing software and hardware. After an initial reset, everything went well and today he was able to take his first, very limited flight, which will now be followed by more daring and longer ones.
Suspended on four very light legs is a sort of shoe box, in size, with the engine and the brain of Ingenuity, which is necessarily endowed with great autonomy and intelligence since it has to do everything by itself, due to the distance that makes it impossible to govern. the means on Mars in real time.
Less than one meter in height, 1.8 kilograms the weight on Earth, obviously reduced on Mars which has a gravity equal to 38% of that of the Earth, 1.2 meters the measure of the two counter-rotating blades.
So: it weighs less than on Earth, but there the atmosphere is much more rarefied and the sums made have required that the two rotors spin today at 2500 rpm, an enormous amount if you consider that land helicopters reach a maximum of 500. But everything it went to the best and also the attitude during the flight was perfectly maintained.
Martian perspectives
What awaits us now, you may be wondering. This, it should be specified, is only an experiment, a demonstrator in short, costing 85 million dollars, and now it must make NASA technicians understand if it will be possible to make longer flights to explore the planet.