All,
Wilbur and Orville Wright changed the world with their first flight of the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903, in North Carolina. They flew it four times that day, only making it about 850 feet each time they got it in the air but somehow, they must have known that what they were doing was revolutionary.
Since that fateful day in 1903, airplanes have been used to connect the world, fight in wars, deliver mail, and everything in-between. There’s something magical about the thought of two guys in a field with plywood and canvas and the repercussions of that day.
In the past week, the world may have borne witness to a similar world-changing event, only, it wasn’t in a field in North Carolina, and it wasn’t with plywood and canvas.
Ingenuity, a four-pound flying machine controlled through sophisticated computer software is being flown around the surface of Mars in search of evidence of life on the red planet. Its very first flight was flying straight up for 10 seconds. Sounds simple enough right?
That’s where you would be wrong. Unlike Earth, Mars has a very thin atmosphere (the surface of Mars is comparable to Earth’s atmosphere at 100,000 feet) which makes flying a helicopter on Mars very difficult because it needs to create more lift than usual. To do this engineers needed to create a machine that could spin its rotor 2,537 times per minute, about five times faster than the rotor speed of a regular helicopter.
There are many more ways to say why this is impressive including the fact that it cannot be controlled by humans because radio waves can’t travel to Mars fast enough or that the entire machine could only weigh four pounds while also enduring the trip through space, but I’m more interested in what it will mean for the future.
Flying machines like Ingenuity give us an advantage that traditional rovers cannot, speed. Perseverance, the rover accompanying Ingenuity, has a top speed of 0.1 mph. Needless to say, Perseverance will be taking a methodical approach to finding life on Mars and any other research being done. On the other hand, Ingenuity has been on many test runs since its revolutionary first flight and has graduated to flying the length of an American football field in under a minute and a half.
This new element of speed will allow researchers to reach new places like cliff sides and valleys on Mars to better understand the red planet and its history. Hopefully, with the development and employment of more flying machines like Ingenuity, we’ll be able to learn more about the secrets of the universe and use it as a stepping stone into the future.
A couple of guys with some plywood and canvas changed the world one fateful day in North Carolina, imagine what NASA scientists can do with a helicopter on Mars.
And now the news.
*Look out for Wednesday for a new episode of “Are We There Yet?” with special guest Adam Kall for his take on Ingenuity and the doors it can open streaming on Soundcloud and Spotify*
Jacob Czopek