On July 30, 2020, the helicopter to Mars started its journey tagging along with the Perservenes rover arriving on February 18, 2021. However, they still faced the daunting task of the helicopter flying and landing on Mars. At 3:30 am on April 19, 2021, NASA hit a huge milestone with Ingenuity taking off and landing back on mars. According to the Ingenuity team, “the helicopter took off, climbed to about 10 feet (3 meters) above the ground, hovered in the air briefly, completed a turn, and then landed.” This is a very big deal for NASA while this is the first powered flight in a thin atmosphere on Mars. Ingenuity was controlled from Earth by a crew sending its commands at the appropriate times. Now that the flight was successful, they will begin working on flying farther and higher distances.

Ingenuity took a long seven years of building and designing to finally get it ready to fly. With many challenges thrown its way it finally started its journey to mars riding with the perseverance rover. Once the rover successfully landed on Mars, it waited to release Ingenuity until it found a suitable “helipad” to release it. From there Ingenuity began its journey of flying and landing on Mars. According to TechCrunch, “it intends to gather massive amounts of data about what happens during its flight test so that it can transmit that to the rover, which then leapfrogs the information back to Earth.” The rover and the Helicopter are working together to gather information about Mars and transfer it back to Earth. Now that NASA has achieved a huge accomplishment with Ingenuity, they will be working on exploring more of space.“NASA is now preparing for an ambitious new era of sustainable human spaceflight and discovery.” They are now working on bigger and better things to achieve more accomplishments.