The Smithsonian would love to display the first vehicle to achieve powered flight on another world, but with NASA's Ingenuity helicopter still busy setting records on Mars, the Washington, D.C. institution has accepted the next best thing.
Officials from NASA and the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum marked the agency's donation of the aerial prototype for Ingenuity into the museum's collection at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia on Friday (Dec. 15). The full-scale prototype was the first to demonstrate that an aircraft could fly in the atmosphere of another planet during tests performed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
The prototype's first free flight in a simulated Mars environment gave NASA the confidence to commit to sending Ingenuity to Mars. The helicopter and its companion Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.
"This is something that I had at the top of my wish list ever since I heard that Ingenuity was flying along with Perseverance," Matt Shindell, curator for planetary science and exploration at the National Air and Space Museum, said in an interview with collectSPACE.com. "I really wanted to bring into the museum at some point some piece of [the Mars Helicopter's] development that would speak to both the process of developing this new technology and to represent that technology itself in future exhibits."
The prototype's May 31, 2016 flight took place in JPL's Space Simulator, a 25-foot-wide (7.6 meters) vacuum chamber. The Martian atmosphere was simulated by first evacuating the air from the chamber and then backfilling it with a small amount of carbon dioxide.
Related: Mars helicopter Ingenuity: First aircraft to fly on Red Planet
