Watch NASA’s autonomous helicopter take its first flight on Mars

An autonomous helicopter called Ingenuity made the first powered and controlled flight on another planet on Monday — and NASA has the video to prove it. The 1.8 kg robot climbed three meters above Mars, hovered in the air for about 30 seconds, and then returned to the red planet’s surface. It was only a brief trip, but Ingenuity had to overcome some major challenges on the way. The Martian atmosphere is just 1% as dense as that of the surface of our planet, which means there’s little air for the chopper’s 1.2-meter-wide rotor blades to push against. [Read: The biggest tech trends of 2021,…

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