Image Courtesy of NASA JPL
On February 18th the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) landed its Perseverance rover on the surface of the red planet, and, hanging from the belly of the car-sized craft is a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) known as Ingenuity. Back in 2019 at the SPAR3D event in Anaheim, MiMi Aung, Deputy Division Manager of Autonomous Systems at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, gave a keynote on the challenges of designing a helicopter that would fly on Mars. Today, we are just weeks away from our first unmanned flight on another planet.
Ingenuity was developed at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and it’s an engineering marvel. Even though NASA does not label the unmanned craft as a drone or UAV, it fits the bill: it flies independently of human interaction, is electrically powered, and uses blades to generate lift.