NASA’s Ingenuity made the first successful powered flight on another planet when it flew on Mars in 2021.
Ingenuity was a small robotic helicopter carried to Mars by the Perseverance rover. It completed its first flight on April 19, 2021, in Jezero crater. The helicopter rose about three meters, hovered, turned, and landed after roughly 39 seconds. That brief test proved that controlled, powered flight was possible in Mars’s extremely thin atmosphere.
The achievement was technically difficult because the Martian atmosphere is less than one percent as dense as Earth’s at the surface. Ingenuity therefore used rapidly spinning rotors and operated autonomously, since radio signals take too long for joystick control from Earth. Its original mission called for only a handful of flights, but it greatly exceeded that plan.
Ingenuity was a technology demonstrator rather than the mission’s main science vehicle. Dragonfly is a future NASA rotorcraft mission planned for Titan, and Sojourner was a wheeled Mars rover from Pathfinder.