The Mars Helicopter That Would Not Die
Unsung Science
CBS News
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2023
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The star attraction of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission is the Perseverance rover. But bolted to its underside was a stowaway: A tiny, 19-inch helicopter called Ingenuity. She was intended to fly five times on Mars, as a wild experiment to see if anything could fly in Mars’s incredibly thin atmosphere. But as the speed, altitude, length, and usefulness of Ingenuity’s flights improved, her mission was extended indefinitely. Ingenuity is still flying, nearly a year after its original mission was to end—and now, NASA is designing a new generation of Mars helicopters, based on her unlikely success. In this episode, meet the three engineers who created Ingenuity—and kept her flying against all physical, planetary, and managerial odds.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In 2013, a splinter faction of NASA engineers had the bizarre idea to build a helicopter and |
| 0:10.2 | send it to Mars, attached to the belly of the Mars 2020 rover. |
| 0:16.2 | Not everybody loved the idea. |
| 0:18.2 | There were more than a handful of people who were very happy to just get this stupid distraction |
| 0:24.6 | off the rover. |
| 0:25.6 | You know, it's a nuisance. |
| 0:26.8 | Yeah, there were a lot of skeptics within the engineering community at large. |
| 0:31.6 | Today, the skeptics have become cheerleaders. |
| 0:35.0 | Today, NASA is designing more Mars helicopters, bigger ones, better ones. |
| 0:41.0 | This may be the most amazing Cinderella story in space engineering history. |
| 0:46.5 | I'm David Poe, and this is Unsung Science. |
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