[imagesource: NASA]

There was an intense moment of waiting for the Mars Rover, Perseverance, to land on the Red Planet in February.

Percy, as she’s known, was carrying Ingenuity, the first helicopter on Mars, which was meant to make history with the first ‘Wright brother moment’ in another world.

Finally, that moment came, but not without some hiccups beforehand.

As we know, landing and taking off on Mars is terribly difficult with the thin atmosphere and low gravity, so the computation of any machine on Mars with the goal of flying has to be perfect.

Ingenuity was meant to fly on April 11, but an issue was discovered in the pre-flight check, which delayed the event.

Then, on April 19, Ingenuity took off all by itself (as in, autonomously, with no help from its teams on Earth) for a total of 40 seconds and landed with perfection.

Via CNN:

The 4-pound (1,8 kg) helicopter spun up its two 4-foot blades (close to 122cm), rose up 10 feet (3 meters) in the air, hovered, made a turn, took a photo, and touched back down on Mars.

Image: NASA

Perseverance, like a proud mother watching its child walk for the first time, captured Ingenuity in flight, too, and sent the data back to NASA to confirm the whole event.

Here’s a picture:

Image: NASA

Of course, Perseverance also provided a video:

The team working on the Ingenuity flight project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in South Carolina  jumped for joy when they received news that the flight was a success:

“We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity project manager at JPL. “We’ve been talking about our Wright brothers moment on another planet for so long. And now, here it is.”

Yeah, they were stoked:

“Once we get to the fourth and fifth flights, we’ll have fun,” Aung said. “We really want to push the limits. It’s not every day that you get to test a rotorcraft on Mars. So we want to be very adventurous.”

Is it a bad time to mention that there is some contestation about whether the Wright brothers really were the first to fly in an aircraft?