space
Carried to Mars tucked beneath NASA's Perseverance rover, this tiny solar-powered rotorcraft lifted off in April 2021 to achieve a historic first.
Ingenuity was the small solar-powered helicopter carried to Mars beneath the Perseverance rover, and its first flight in April 2021 marked the first powered, controlled flight ever achieved on another planet, a genuine engineering feat given Mars' thin atmosphere provides far less lift than Earth's.
Perseverance is the rover that carried Ingenuity to Mars and drives across the surface collecting rock samples, it did not fly. Curiosity is an earlier NASA rover still exploring Mars, also a ground vehicle with no connection to powered flight.
Ingenuity was designed to attempt just five test flights as a technology demonstration, but it performed so well that NASA kept flying it for years, eventually completing 72 flights before a hard landing ended its mission in early 2024.
space
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