Applaud!

Environmental & Science Education, STEM, Earth and Space Sciences, Solar system

Ed Hessler 

The Ingenuity helicopter flight was successful yesterday, adding yet another notch to this skein of achievements. What a marvelous bit of engineering, technology, computing and human ingenuity this flight into space and landing elsewhere has been from its beginning.

Here are two clips from the BBC World News. The first is of the flight itself (1m 41s); the second is the reaction on the ground to its successful flight (1m 13s).

And for the details with diagrams, still photographs, and videos is BBC Science Reporter Jonathan Amos's report which is not to be missed to fill in the gaps. Amos writes "Getting airborne on the Red Planet is not easy. The atmosphere is very thin, just 1% of the density here at Earth. This gives the blades on a rotorcraft very little to bite into to gain lift.

"There's help from the lower gravity at Mars, but still - it takes a lot of work to get up off the ground."