A piece of flight pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright’s first airplane is on Mars.
NASA’s experimental Mars helicopter holds a small swatch of fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer, the space agency revealed on Tuesday.
The helicopter, named Ingenuity, hitched a ride to the Red Planet with the Perseverance rover, arriving last month.
Photo: AFP / NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
Ingenuity is to attempt the first powered, controlled flight on another planet as soon as on April 8.
It would mark a “Wright brothers’ moment,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory director for planetary science Bobby Braun said.
The Carillon Historical Park in Dayton, Ohio, the Wrights’ hometown, donated the postage-size piece of muslin from the plane’s bottom-left wing.
The swatch made the 480 million kilometer journey to Mars with the blessing of the Wright brothers’ great-grandniece and great-grandnephew, said Steve Lucht, a curator at the park.
“Wilbur and Orville Wright would be pleased to know that a little piece of their 1903 Wright Flyer I, the machine that launched the space age by barely one quarter of a mile, is going to soar into history again on Mars,” Amanda Wright Lane and Stephen Wright said in a statement provided by the park.
Orville Wright was on board for the world’s first powered, controlled flight on Dec. 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The brothers took turns, making four flights that day.
A fragment of the Wright airplane flew to the moon with Apollo 11 in 1969.
A swatch also accompanied astronaut John Glenn into orbit aboard the Discovery space shuttle in 1998.
NASA’s 1.8kg helicopter is to attempt to rise 3m into the extremely thin Martian air on its first hop. Up to five increasingly higher and longer flights are planned over the course of a month.
The material is taped to a cable beneath the helicopter’s solar panel, which is perched on top like a graduate’s mortarboard.
For now, Ingenuity remains attached to the rover’s belly. A protective shield was dropped last weekend, exposing the spindly, long-legged chopper.
The helicopter airfield is right next to the rover’s landing site in Jezero Crater. The rover is to observe the test flights from a distant perch, before driving away to pursue its own mission: hunting for signs of ancient Martian life. Rock samples are to be set aside for eventual return to Earth.
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