60 minutes overtime and liftoff this is something that we've never done before in terms of having
this kind of imagery of our spacecraft landing we've never seen a parachute inflate on another
planet it has confirmed that the parachute has deployed and we're seeing we've never seen
us touch down the spacecraft itself touched down on another planet or this
sky crane fly off into the distance this week on 60 minutes our story is about perseverance
and ingenuity the latest nasa rover to land on mars and its accompanying helicopter which
together could change the way we explore the surfaces of distant planets confirmation of
entry interface al chin led the team at nasa that landed the rover on mars have you ever had that
many cameras no absolutely not this is the first time that we've had both high resolution color
high frame rate cameras everywhere what was it that led you to do that i think it's really just
an opportunity for us to take people along for the ride a ride that in part was built by matt keenan
and ben piperberg their team at aerovironment oversaw the creation of ingenuities rotors
motors and landing gear thumbs up here we go last month ingenuity made history when
it took off for the first flight ever in the atmosphere of another planet
it's rectangular keenan showed us one of the first prototype motors he made
for ingenuity so how do you make sure it's perfect lots of testing
so the first motor i did this was my my little trial teaching myself yeah it's pretty pathetic
i mean it's obsessive this was you know dozens of hours of messing around and using little pieces
of plastic and wood and metal as guides so that the wire would stay centered going through and
then i'd pull it tight and then i'd do another one and then once i would wind one tooth i would test
it and the first motor that i actually made for for jpl for delivery it took me a hundred hours
for keenan and pipenburg this project is a long time coming they first met about 20 years ago
when pipenberg was a teenager yeah i recruited him at a model airplane contest you met him at
when he was 14 at a model airplane yeah so we're you know we're kind of nerdy and we make these
little micro radio control models pretty high tech and i had been writing articles
and we had this one annual get-together that we would go to called the neat fair micro seminars
and he found us on the internet and showed up and we just show our stuff and flies that's amazing
and then now he's the the lead mechanical engineer he's the chief engineer on this
you want to try it all right go ahead you've got it slide it right you can push it all the way to
the right if you want i got to fly a terry the terrestrial version of ingenuity uh it's the
one they use here for educational purposes i'll bring it up a little bit now stop it's not as
complex as the one that's on on mars but it gives you a sense of of what it looks like
and how it flies all right let me take over now i've switched you out and we'll go back to the why
go through all this what's the point of having a helicopter besides being really cool on mars well
so aerial robotics in general are we think going to be very useful for exploring the solar system
we're just trying to get engineering data that tells us that helicopters can be used uh for this
kind of a mission and then from there we'll go on to much larger much more exciting science missions
so what are you working on now i'm beginning to work on the rest of the sample return campaign
perseverance is this first leg of this relay race to bring back samples from mars to earth
and the samples that that perseverance is going to take they're going to stay on mars
for another mission that's right next mission's got to pick them up
launch them into mars orbit where they're picked up by an orbiter and then bring them back here
to earth and then we have to land here on earth so we've got a couple more landings ahead of us