NASA Ingenuity Summary and Readers Response Reupload
On February 18, 2021, helicopter Ingenuity ; landed on Jezero Crater, Mars, along with rover, Perseverance (Gohd , 2021). Ingenuity is the first aircraft to have flown on Mars. According to Mimi Aung, Ingenuity’s project manager at NASA, Ingenuity had been fully tested on Earth before the Mars mission. The final prototype for Ingenuity flew in a space simulator chamber inside the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was programmed to imitate the Martian atmosphere (Aung, 2018). According to NASA, Ingenuity’s main responsibility was not research, but to test and prove that flight is possible on Mars. While it is only 0.49 meters tall with a weight of 1.8kg, its 1.2 meters carbon-fiber rotors can spin up to 2500 revolutions per minute. Ingenuity faced several challenges during its mission, such as attempting flight in Mars' thin atmosphere and dealing with wind and dust storms as well as getting enough energy for survival. Ingenuity succeeded in its first three flights, flyin