The Mars Ingenuity Helicopter
has taken flight.
I just want to congratulate the team
on an amazing, historic first.
First controlled powered flight on another planet.
Just truly amazing.
Ingenuity landed with its mothership,
Perseverance, in February 2021.
This really is a Wright Brothers moment.
This morning our dream came true.
And thus far
is exceeding all expectations.
The first flight of a powered aircraft
on another planet.
Drones have conquered the Earth and Mars.
Next, there'll be heading out even further
into our solar system.
In 2027, NASA is planning to launch a one
of a kind spacecraft.
Dragonfly is a rotorcraft lander
that's going to Saturn's moon, Titan,
which is one of the most interesting places
in the solar system, but I'm pretty biased.
If all goes according to plan,
Dragonfly will touch down in the 2030's
and spend years exploring this exotic landscape.
It's very cold there.
It's minus 290 Fahrenheit,
just above liquid nitrogen temperatures.
And it's very distant from Earth.
The mission could provide breakthroughs
that could connect this frozen moon to Earth's past.
What we learn from Dragonfly
on Titan could potentially inform missions
to other ocean worlds in the solar system.
But first it has
to survive a billion mile journey,
a cryogenic atmosphere, and a two hour descent,
and that's just getting there.
(tense music)
Ingenuity, part of the current Mars Perseverance mission,
has successfully completed its initial test flight.
This really is a Wright brothers moment.
It's the start of a whole new kind of planetary exploration
and we'll build on Ingenuity's success
to see how we can deploy this capability
on future Mars missions.
And returning these amazing vistas.
It did it just perfectly.
We really did leave the ground.
Each step of the Ingenuity mission is critical
to proving a self-sufficient drone
can explore other planets.
Washplate turbos appear healthy,
overall actuators appear healthy.
This is flight control confirming
that we have EVR's from Ingenuity.
When things work, it looks easy.
I would like to take this opportunity
to remind how difficult it is to fly a rotorcraft at Mars.
The initial flight lasted 20 to 30 seconds
and consisted of Ingenuity hovering
at a small altitude above the surface.
Having performed spin up, take off, climb,
hover, descent, landing, touchdown, and spindown.
(all clapping)
Ingenuity itself is extremely healthy at this point,
all in all it's in a perfect state,
and I'm just really excited to see what all she
can teach us over the next few weeks
as we explore area mobility on Mars.
With each subsequent flight,
the engineers collect more data
to help push the chopper further,
in both distance and duration.
Just in general terms what you're talking about here
is going higher, going further, going faster.
Especially towards the end
of the experimental window,
we will be pushing the envelope and really stretching
and understanding how well we can fly.
Ingenuity has marked the beginning
of other worldly flight.
Ingenuity is a technology demonstration,
but it's a very important one for Dragonfly.
It's the first extra terrestrial rotorcraft,
and we've all been watching, hoping that it will succeed.
And we're very happy with the success that it's had so far.
And it's a precursor
to NASA's most ambitious mission yet, Titan,
where the thick atmosphere allows
for a much larger craft.
Dragonfly's rotors will spin at about 800 RPM.
Whereas Ingenuity is rotors spin at about 2,500 RPM.
While there are less distant places to visit
in our solar system, Titan has the most going for it.
It's because Titan is so Earth-like
and so alien at the same time,
that it makes a fantastic target to study,
just as an explorer.
Although the destinations
are remarkably different,
Mars ingenuity proves a rotorcraft
can not only survive the journey,
but thrive in its objective.
We don't have drones that, you know,
survive minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit at night.
We don't have drones that fly
in 1% of the atmosphere of Earth.
This technological Marvel
is no off the shelf drone.
I think everybody's seen a drone flying around
all these little multirotor copters,
especially quad copters, people watch,
but Dragonfly's on a different scale.
It's very large.
The rotors are 53 inches in diameter.
The lander itself weighs close to a ton.
So it's very big.
It's the size of a Mini Cooper, on that order.
A rotorcraft is the very best way to explore Titan
because it allows us to both do pinpoint landings
and inspection, and also cover large distances
to be able to see vastly different locations on the surface.
Very different terrain, very different science objectives.
Titan's atmosphere enables engineers
to make Dragonfly 500 times more massive
and fly almost 50 times further than it's Mars counterpart.
So it's actually much easier to fly on Titan
than it is on Earth.
Some place like Mars,
which Mars has a very thin atmosphere.
So it's actually much harder to fly
on Mars than it will be on Titan.
Titan has a thick enough atmosphere and low enough gravity
that a person could basically strap on some wings
and flap around on Titan, kind of almost like a bird.
So on Titan, the challenge isn't flying, flying is easy.
The challenge is the environment.
It's very cold there, it's minus 290 Fahrenheit
just above liquid nitrogen temperatures,
and it's very distant from Earth.
So that means that it takes a long time
for us to send commands
and receive data from the Lander.
With Ingenuity NASA is able
to give direct commands to the drone
and even update software via an orbiting spacecraft.
Dragonfly will have no such luxuries.
It's incrementally autonomous.
It executes sequences that we tell it to execute
and it does them autonomously
because there's no way to communicate
with the Lander real time.
But it does not execute the whole mission autonomously.
There's a over an hour communication delay
between Earth and Titan.
The Lander will need to essentially fly itself down
on its very first flight to a world
that we don't have very many images.
The images they do have are courtesy
of Huygens, a probe dropped off on Titan
in 2005 by the Cassini spacecraft.
What Huygens revealed during its mission helped
prepare the scientists for what to expect.
We look at these landforms, these pictures from Cassini
and say, yes, those are clearly dunes that we're looking at.
On Titan, these sand grains are made up
of some bizarre organics that only Dragonfly
is going to be able to tell us
what they're actually made of.
One element Cassini did confirm was
that Titan is ideal for a rotorcraft mission.
Titan atmosphere is 10 times thicker
and 300 times denser than the Martian atmosphere.
But what that does for us is it creates a special challenge.
On Mars it only takes seven minutes
to get through the atmosphere,
whereas it takes us two and a half hours
to descend through that atmosphere.
Dragonfly is scheduled to launch
in 2027 and travel roughly a billion miles
before reaching Titan.
Such an epic journey requires a special power supply.
One of the enabling technologies
that we're planning to use on Dragonfly
is a multi-mission radio isotope thermal electric generator,
or an MMRTG.
And the way that works is it uses the decay
of plutonium 238 to generate heat,
and from that heat, we generate electricity,
and we use both the heat to keep the Lander warm,
and the electricity to power the Lander
on the surface of Titan.
Power that will be used
to run cutting edge experiments.
One of the pieces of data that I'm most excited
to get back down on the ground
are the data from the gamma ray and neutron spectrometer.
It's a mouthful, but the power of this instrument
is that it's going to look beneath the surface
and tell us if there are sediments
beneath where we're actually sampling with the drill.
Every piece of data collection is critical
to this and future missions.
Dragonfly will adapt its mission as it goes.
And what we have to do here on Earth
is provide the steps that the Lander
will take to do that, and then rely
on the Lander's autonomy to execute those steps,
and make the appropriate decisions
when the situation calls for it.
Mars' Ingenuity and Dragonfly
are just the beginning.
If the two drones perform well,
space choppers could soon begin leaving Earth
in relatively large numbers.
It's the start of a whole new kind
of planetary exploration
and we'll build on Ingenuity's success
to see how we can deploy this capability
on future Mars missions.
Dragonfly will be able to fly
into dozens of promising locations on Titan.
This longevity will greatly aid Dragonfly's search
for prebiotic chemicals, common on both Titan and Earth.
One of the reasons we want to study Titan's ice crust is
because it covers a subsurface ocean,
an ocean of liquid water.
And we know that there are organics on Titan's surface.
So if there's any possibility of moving those organics
that we're going to sample with Dragonfly down
through the ice crust, to the subsurface ocean,
then we start to talk about another realm
of possible habitability on Titan.
During its nearly three year mission,
Dragonfly will explore diverse environments
from organic dunes to the floor of an impact crater,
where liquid water once existed.
We want to know more about the history of Titan
because the evolution of Titan may hold clues
to our own past.
We think that before biology really took
over here on the Earth,
it might've had an atmosphere that was kind of hazy,
similar to Titan's today.
And the production of that haze might've been
what helped seed wherever life really took off.
What we learn from Dragonfly
on Titan could potentially inform missions
to other ocean worlds in the solar system.
In space exploration there are always questions
that we don't even know to ask yet,
and Titan might tell us what some of those questions are.
Meanwhile, back on Mars, Ingenuity continues
to capture the hearts of explorers everywhere.
Passing its first battery of flight tests
with flying colors and paving the way
for future flying machines on other planets.
(dramatic music)