The first ever aircraft to fly on another planet, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, took off from the Martian surface at 3:46 am Monday morning. The craft rose to about 10 feet, hovered for about 30 seconds then descended to a soft landing roughly 200 feet from the Perseverance rover which carried Ingenuity to the red planet in it’s undercarriage.
While airborne, Ingenuity took a photo — a selfie of it’s shadow cast on the barren Martian surface. Although it didn’t carry any scientific payload, the four-pound copter did establish a proof-of-concept for controlled autonomous flight on distant worlds, a feat we are sure to see more of in the not-so-distant future.
Photo: NASA, JPL, Cal-Tech
