First Flight On Mars

On April 19, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter became the first aircraft to fly on another planet.

Our most recent package details the historic first flight of the 4-lb. robotic rotorcraft, which lasted 39.1 seconds, and its follow-up venture on April 22, and looks ahead to its future test program. The technology lays the groundwork for aerial exploration of Mars, an aeronautical feat given the air density of Mars is less than 1% of the density on Earth. See below for more.

“How do we use aerial mobility in the future on Mars, to help not just robotic exploration, but to help human exploration?”
Ellen Stofan
Smithsonian
Jun 03, 2013
John C. Bierwirth, who led the Grumman Corp. in the 1970s and '80s through the development of the U.S. Navy's F-14 fighter and other military aircraft, NASA space shuttle and space station work, and various diversification efforts, died May 26 in a hospice on Long Island, N.Y., of congestive heart failure. He was 89.
Jun 03, 2013
The International Space Station (ISS) returned to a six-person crew May 28 with a second Soyuz “express” mission. The Russian capsule docked with the orbiting science lab at 10:10 p.m. EDT—less than 6 hr. after lifting off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (shown)—delivering veteran cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Luca Parmitano of Italy.
Jun 03, 2013
Congress may put a lunar landing back on the table
Jun 03, 2013
First towed tests set stage for approach-and-landing evaluation
Jun 03, 2013
The 50th Paris air show will offer French space agency CNES an opportunity to detail engineering tradeoffs being weighed as it designs a leaner, more cost-effective successor to Europe's Ariane 5 heavy-lift rocket. The new launcher is expected to fly in 2020, assuming European Space Agency (ESA) governments approve the estimated €4 billion ($5.2 billion) project at a meeting of ESA ministers slated for 2014.
Jun 03, 2013
Space solar power plan lauded for vision, but not for business case
Jun 03, 2013
A micrometeoroid might be the culprit for an abrupt attitude problem that halted the flow of critical weather-prediction data for the U.S. East Coast from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite.
Jun 03, 2013
Globally, aerospace and defense merger and acquisition activity has been slow for quite awhile, but Curtis Reusser and Mike Dumais have had plenty to do. They have been heading integration teams for the exception to that rule—the new business unit created by United Technologies' $18.4 billion purchase of Goodrich Aerospace last September.