This week saw a historic milestone in aviation: the first powered flight on another world. With little fanfare among the public, a “marscopter” named Ingenuity achieved what had only previously been science fiction. The flight lasted just 39 seconds, as the solar-powered helicopter spun up its two four-foot-wide rotor blades to over 2,500 rpm. Ingenuity flew to a height of 10 feet before safely landing back on the Martian surface.
“Ingenuity is the latest in a long and storied tradition of NASA projects achieving a space exploration goal once thought impossible,” said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk in a recent press release.
This little hitchhiker on the Perseverance Rover mission was an engineering proof of concept. NASA expects powered flight to become standard during future missions. A flying mission can scout the terrain ahead or reach areas inaccessible via wheels on the ground. The next interplanetary rotorcraft, the Dragonfly mission, is scheduled to head to Saturn’s moon Titan six years from now. NASA seems to be channeling the ghost of Arthur C. Clarke. In his novel The Sirens of Titan, he imagined soaring in the clouds of the moon’s thick atmosphere.
The entire flight was autonomous, as Mars is currently 173 million miles from Earth, a distance so vast that radio messages take 30 minutes to make a round trip. For this reason, remote command was impossible. Imagine flying a drone and seeing its onboard camera relay the “live” video, showing it heading straight for a cliff wall—knowing it actually crashed 15 minutes ago.
“We have been thinking for so long about having our ‘Wright Brothers moment’ on Mars, and here it is,” said project manager MiMi Aung (NASA-JPL) in a recent press release. “We will take a moment to celebrate our success and then take a cue from Orville and Wilbur regarding what to do next. History shows they got back to work to learn as much as they could about their new aircraft — and so will we.”
Ingenuity carries a one inch-square piece of fabric from the original Wright Brothers flyer to commemorate the occasion. And similar to the Wright brother’s first flight from Kill Devil Hill, a second flight was longer, demonstrating controlled flight in pitch and yawl.
NASA named the Martian “airfield” Wright Brothers Field, in honor of the first powered flight in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. That historic event was also brief, lasting only 12 seconds and flew only 110 feet. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) even awarded the Martian heliport an airport code (JZRO), an identifier that all airports have worldwide. And just like any helicopter, Ingenuity received an ATC flight call sign “IGY-1.”
Before the Wright’s built their heavier-than-air flying machine, we had balloons and dirigibles to break the surly bonds of Earth. The same progress was made in space. In June 1985, a planetary weather balloon was dropped into the atmosphere of Venus by Vega-1, the Soviet spacecraft on its way to a rendezvous with Halley’s comet.
Aviation has fascinated me from that Sunday afternoon in 1969 when I saw Apollo 11 land on the moon. Since my first solo flight over forty years ago, I’ve piloted 34 different types of aircraft and sailplanes, and I’m still amazed at the progress we made since that first flight at Kitty Hawk. My grandmother was born two years before the Wrights took off in their wood and fabric biplane. I recall her stories of her meeting a WWI flying ace, the ticker-tape parade for Lindbergh after he made the first transatlantic flight, her first airline flight in a Ford Trimotor, and the time we sat together and watched Neil Armstrong step foot on the moon. She witnessed all this in little more than fifty years. Yet, it didn’t start out with much fanfare or publicity.
At the moment the Wright Flyer lifted into the air in that remote place with only five spectators, it was an obscure event. It seemed that the world wasn’t interested. A wire telling their father to “inform press” produced nothing even in their hometown paper, the Dayton Journal. Attempts at the Virginian-Pilot to sell the story elsewhere also fell flat—only five papers bought the item and ran it the following day on the back pages. Not sure what to make of the event, The New York Tribune carried the article on the sports page—just underneath the report of a sandlot football game in Brooklyn.
It took years to understand what they had achieved and where this first flight would take us. We can say the same of that little Martian whirlybird. Few watched the event. The report of the first flight on an alien world was lost in the news cycle that beamed its light on the Chauvin verdict, Biden’s Climate Summit, and India’s struggle with the pandemic. But like the 1903 first flight from Kitty Hawk, NASA’s first flight from Wright Brothers Field on Mars is an important starting point. Who can say where this journey will take us?