On February 18th, NASA successfully landed the rover Perseverance on Mars, to a live audience of more than two million people (and a lot of nervous NASA employees). After over 131 million miles traveling through space,, Perseverance shed its heat shield and gently touched down on the strange surface of Earth’s neighboring planet, the fifth rover to touch its wheels down on alien soil.
Perseverance was not alone, either: it was accompanied by Ingenuity, a tiny helicopter who tagged along for the trip, joining Perseverance (and the already on-planet Curiosity rover) as the metallic space trio exploring foreign lands. And Ingenuity is there for its own mission: while Perseverance is on its way to study a hole where a lake may have been over 3 billion years ago, Ingenuity will be attempting the first powered flight on any planet outside Earth, hopefully setting the stage for future Mars missions.
Strangely enough, anyone could run the software inside Ingenuity; Ingenuity runs on open-source flight software designed for the Linux environment called F’ (or “F Prime”), the first space object of its kind to operate successfully in space. So for those who always wanted to be a part of a space experiment, but maybe never had the advanced physics knowledge, to enjoy a little piece of space history, right above the trees in their own backyard.
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