Ingenuity flew on Mars. Sixty seconds that

We flew on Mars.

39.1 seconds. Three meters off the ground. A 1.8 kilogram helicopter named Ingenuity spun its blades at 2,537 RPM, lifted off the surface of another planet, hovered, rotated, and landed.

The video from Perseverance’s cameras is grainy. Short. The helicopter is a small dark shape against the salmon sky. It goes up. It hovers. It comes down. That’s it.

It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in months.

What happened

NASA JPL commanded Ingenuity from 173 million miles away. Because of the signal delay, there was no joystick, no real-time control. The helicopter flew itself. The flight plan was uploaded hours earlier. Ingenuity executed it autonomously.

On a planet with 1% of Earth’s atmospheric density. With gravity that’s 38% of Earth’s. In temperatures that drop to -90 Celsius at night. Running on a processor that has the computing power of a smartphone, kept warm by a small heater that runs off a solar panel the size of a tissue box.

Every single one of those constraints should have made this impossible. The team at JPL made it possible anyway.

The Wright Brothers thing

NASA named the flight location “Wright Brothers Field.” A piece of fabric from the original Wright Flyer was onboard Ingenuity.

I keep thinking about the parallel. December 17, 1903. Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. A wood-and-fabric biplane flew for 12 seconds, covering 120 feet. Nobody cared. The local newspaper barely covered it. Two bicycle mechanics had done something that most of the world’s engineers said was impossible, and the world shrugged.

April 19, 2021. Jezero Crater, Mars. A small drone flew for 39 seconds, reaching 3 meters. The engineering community celebrated. The public watched the grainy video and said “cool.” Then moved on.

The Wright Brothers’ first flight was the beginning of aviation. By 1969, we were on the Moon. The curve from “12 seconds, 120 feet” to “8 days, 240,000 miles” took 66 years.

Ingenuity’s first flight is the beginning of Martian aviation. I don’t know where the curve goes from here. But it goes somewhere.

What I felt

I watched the JPL livestream alone in my apartment. When the data came back confirming the flight was successful, the engineers at JPL clapped and cheered (through masks, still in a pandemic, still socially distanced).

I clapped too. Alone. Again. I keep doing this. Clapping at screens by myself during a pandemic while machines do extraordinary things on other planets.

The feeling is hard to name. It’s not just excitement. It’s something closer to gratitude. That I’m alive at the same time this is happening. That I get to watch humans solve problems that physics said were unsolvable, on a planet that’s 300 million miles away, using a helicopter that weighs less than a bag of flour.

39.1 seconds.

That’s all it took to prove it was possible.

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