Things are Really Looking Up (on Mars)

Did you know that NASA’s aeronautical innovators had a hand in the creation of the first flying vehicle on Mars? Since the late 1970s, NASA has been studying how to enable planetary flight with aerial vehicles, especially Mars airplanes. In the late 1990s, NASA began studying Mars rotorcraft and other vertical lift planetary aerial vehicles. The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was developed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory with substantial contributions from Ames Research Center and Langley Research Center. Ames research engineers from the Aeromechanics Office performed detailed work in areas such as performance predictions, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis, control law validation, and experimental analysis. Langley research engineers from the center’s Aeronautics Research Directorate provided high-fidelity CFD analysis of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in hover and forward flight in a Martian atmosphere.