- This month, NASA's four pound Ingenuity Helicopter
separated from the belly of the Perseverance Rover.
A day later, the Rover backed up
to allow the helicopters solar array to charge
and sent this picture back to earth.
- If this flight is successful,
I think it is a transformative event for
planetary exploration.
- This is a model of NASA's Ingenuity helicopter.
In just a few days, a duplicate of this craft
will attempt something never done before.
Flight on Mars.
- (unintelligible) indicates she was deployed.
- [Woman] We have confirmation that the
Lander vision system has produced a valid solution.
- [Narrator] Ingenuity was carried to Mars
by NASA's Perseverance Rover.
- [Woman] Touch-down confirmed.
- [Narrator] Which landed on on the red planet
on February 18th, after a seven month
293 million mile voyage from Earth.
Since touching down on the martian surface,
Perseverance has been snapping pictures
and analyzing nearby rocks.
But perhaps the most anticipated part of the Rover's mission
is still to take place.
The flight of its martian helicopter.
Ingenuity.
- So Ingenuity was designed as a
tech demo to show that aerial robotics like this
are able to be used for planetary exploration.
- [Narrator] Ben Pipenberg is a senior
Aero Mechanical Engineer at AeroVironment.
The contractor hired by NASA to build the aircraft.
- Right now we're in AeroVironment's clean room facility.
I've personally spent thousands of man hours in this room.
And this is the facility that we built
a lot of the flight hardware that's currently on Ingenuity
that's actually on Mars
- [Narrator] For the past seven years,
Pipenberg has been working on making Ingenuity a reality.
- So that seven year development process, uh,
involved a lot of fabrication.
So, taking all of the raw components
turning that into molded, molded parts.
And so, for example, using these kinds of
carbon fiber materials, um, and molding that to
develop the rotor blades on Ingenuity.
Engineering something like this for
an environment that we've never actually flown in before
is very challenging.
There have been a lot of other
space probes and missions that have gone to Mars.
And so we have some understanding of the environment.
However nobody's ever flown on Mars before.
- [Narrator] What we do know about the Martian environment
suggest that flight as we know it would be difficult.
- The Martian atmosphere is much thinner
than Earth's atmosphere. It's very similar to earth
at about a hundred thousand feet actually.
- [Narrator] NASA and AeroVironment
had the challenge of designing a craft
without being able to test in the environment
in which it would fly.
- [Ben] A lot of the testing that happened on the
Mars helicopter
happened at JPL's space simulator facility.
It's a Very large vacuum chamber that can be
filled with CO2 gas to simulate the atmosphere on Mars.
You know, it's a really special facility.
There are very few like that in the world.
- [Narrator] To make Ingenuity a reality,
NASA looked to a small defense contractor, AeroVironment.
That specializes in unmanned aerial vehicles.
- [Ben] So right now we're in AeroVironment's
nano air vehicle lab
and this is a research and development space.
And actually a lot of the products that have
come out of AeroVironment have started in this lab.
So this was one of the first helicopters that we actually
built and flew in the space simulator at JPL.
Um. This was just a very simple model
it was attempting to demonstrate free flight
um, in a Martian atmosphere.
And it was the first helicopter that actually did that.
This is one of the very early rotor blade designs
that was tested.
The engineering data that was generated from testing
this prototype fed directly into the development
of the final rotor blade system on, on Ingenuity.
- [Narrator] Ben Pipenberg played a major part
in designing and building the high speed
counter-rotating helicopter blades.
- The rotor blades on Ingenuity are
designed from a composite materials,
so it's carbon fiber over an engineering foam material.
They're very, very lightweight and they're very rigid,
and that's required to, uh, control the helicopter
and to make the whole thing light enough, to be able to fly
- [Narrator] For it's made in flight.
The four pound craft will rise 10 feet above the surface.
- So this flight will be less than a minute, likely, um,
and it'll be roughly one story off the ground, uh.
So very simple, very benign, low risk,
um, low risk to the hardware.
And the whole point here is just to demonstrate
that this is possible and generate the
engineering data that we need to move on to
the more capable, more exciting flights.
- [Narrator] NASA officials have likened Ingenuity
to the Wright brothers' flyer.
Which in 1903 made the first
controlled powered flight on earth.
A 12 second, 120 foot trip.
In homage to that flight, Ingenuity carries with it
a swatch of fabric from the flier on the underside
of its solar panels.
NASA says it plans to conduct up to
five additional flights over the next month.
These future flights will test the helicopter's
ability to fly higher and longer.
Meanwhile, the Perseverance Rover will be nearby.
Observing and recording the historic flights.