Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2021

9 MAY-JUNE 2021 ASTRO PUBLISHING ment on April 8 th was successful, but a high-spin test on April 9 th was cut short by a fault-detecting watchdog timer. With a software update sub- mitted on April 12 th , a high-spin test on the 17 th paved the way for the historic take-off on the 19 th . The care and concern in testing prior to first flight are for obvious reasons – any unsuccessful take-off or rough land- ing on Mars would require either delicate reorienting movements by a rover ill-equipped for such fine- motor control, or human interven- tion in the form of the most expen- sive drone recovery in history. To paraphrase from another famous first, the first flight for Ingenuity was “one small flight for (a) helicop- ter, one giant flight for Martian air travel.” And, for the second time during the Mars 2020 mission, the contingency speech written for mis- sion failure was ripped up during the live video feed. This time, it was JPL Project Manager MiMi Aung, exclaiming “We can now say that human beings have flown a rotor- craft on another planet!” N ASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter took this shot while hovering over the Martian surface on April 19, 2021, during the first instance of powered, controlled flight on an- other planet. It used its navigation camera, which autonomously tracks the ground during flight. On the side, an enlargement that highlights details of the Martian soil under- neath the shade. [NASA/JPL-Caltech] autonomous rovers and the ability of those rovers to do much more meaningful discovery and analysis much more efficiently. The next few rover missions them- selves may benefit greatly from as- sociated drones beyond just better imagery and path planning. Drones provide a means to quickly return- ing sample collections to a common location for analysis or eventual re- turn to Earth for study. Designs ca- pable of supporting more weight can also host spectroscopic equip- ment to pre-study areas prior to rover arrival. Drones also provide access to places rovers simply cannot yet go – sedimentary layers in tall cliffs, the walls of any ancient im- pact craters, or water-carved cer- vices that might hide the remnants of ancient ecosystems. Like so many flights, this first demon- stration was not without some delay. An initial slow-spin test after deploy- !