Question: Helicopter named as Ingenuity is a first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. Which planet is this?
a) Jupiter
b) Mars
c) Venus
d) Mercury
Answer: (b)
Related Facts:
- On 19 April 2021, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on the planet Mars.
- Ingenuity was attached to the belly of Perseverance rover which touched down the Mars surface on 18 February 2021 traveling173 million miles of space from the Earth.
- Then Perseverance Deployed the Ingenuity to the surface of Jezero Crater on April 3, 2021.
- Ingenuity is currently on the 16th sol, or Martian day, of its 30-sol (31-Earth day) flight test window.
- Over the next three sols, the helicopter team will receive and analyze all data and imagery from the test.
- It will then formulate a plan for the second experimental test flight, scheduled for no earlier than April 22.
- The Ingenuity team at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed the flight succeeded after receiving data from the helicopter via NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.
- Altimeter data indicate Ingenuity climbed to its prescribed maximum altitude of 10 feet (3 meters) and maintained a stable hover for 30 seconds.
- It then descended, touching back down on the surface of Mars after logging a total of 39.1 seconds of flight.
- Ingenuity’s initial flight demonstration was autonomous – piloted by onboard guidance, navigation, and control systems running algorithms developed by the team at JPL.
- Because data must be sent to and returned from the Red Planet over hundreds of millions of miles using orbiting satellites and NASA’s Deep Space Network, Ingenuity cannot be flown with a joystick, and its flight was not observable from Earth in real time.
- NASA Associate Administrator for Science Thomas Zurbuchen announced the name for the Martian airfield on which the flight took place.
- According to NASA Now, 117 years after the Wright brothers succeeded in making the first flight on our planet, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has succeeded in performing this amazing feat on another world.
- NASA now has named the airfield from where Ingenuity hovered on Mars as Wright Brothers Field as an homage to the two innovative bicycle makers from Dayton.
By – Rajesh Tripathi