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Top 5 facts about Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.

NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter completed it's first controlled flight using the atmospheric lift on Mars on 19th April. This is the first time that a helicopter has hovered on the surface of a planet other than Earth. The Ingenuity helicopter rose up to 3m high, hovered for about 30 seconds, and then landed on the surface of Mars. This whole maneuver took approximately 39 seconds. Seems very little, right? But even this little time means a lot considering the challenges behind the building and operating this helicopter. So, let's have a look at the top 5 facts of this awesome feat.

1. The memory of the Wright Brothers:

Ingenuity carried a piece of fabric from the wing of the Wright Flyer, the first airplane developed by the Wright brothers to fly on Earth. The take-off and landing zone of Ingenuity is named as Wright Brothers Field.

2. The challenging heights:

Because the density of the atmosphere at Mars is 1/100th of the Earth's, using rotors for lift is challenging. Liftoff from Mars's surface is equivalent to flying at a height of 30,000m. No helicopter on Earth has ever achieved this height. So, it was definitely a challenge. The rotors could not spin too fast or they would be shredded to pieces due to the centrifugal force on them. The helicopter had to be lightweight in order to gain lift.

3. It uses Qualcomm Snapdragon 801:

Now, for me, this is the most surprising fact about Ingenuity, the use of Qualcomm Snapdragon 801, a mobile processor! And the helicopter is operated by Linux operating system. The processor is mainly used for flight control and maneuvering calculations.

4. The naming process:

The helicopter was earlier called as just 'Mars Helicopter'. In an essay she submitted in the ' Name the rover ' contest, it was named Ingenuity by an 11th-grade girl. It is also nicknamed Ginny and the parent rover Perseverance as Percy.

5. The amazing RPM:

In order to achieve lift on the surface of Mars, the 1.8 kg Ingenuity helicopter needs to rotate it's blades 2400 times a minute, which is 40 times a second. Average helicopters on Earth rotate their blades approximately 500 times a minute, which means, Ingenuity has to rotate it's rotors nearly 5 times faster than helicopters on Earth, a challenge posed due to Mars's atmosphere. But, rotating at such high speeds might create undesirable effects like shock waves at the tips of the blade. So, the blade tip speed is kept below 0.7 Mach.

Thank you very much for reading.

TechXplained