Mars atmospheric pressure at sea level is 610 Pa (roughly the equivalent of Earth’s atmosphere 40km up, airliners fly about 11km up). But helping the helicopter, the gravity at Mars surface is only 3.7m/s^2 compared to Earth’s 9.8m/s^2
This is great! Congrats NASA !!
The helicopter succeeded in flying on Mars 
Yes, these space flights shows what real engineering can do (and loads and loads of $ ) This one is fun for us Norwegians as well since the rover has a Norwegian sub terrain radar with a separate “command center” in Oslo/Kjeller. And of course this helicopter drone with a Norwegian lead “pilot” and designer of the flight control systems. I hope it works I think the guy fly GA as well.
alioth wrote:
try to fly a rotocraft on Mars
Yup, not easy with such a thin atmosphere!
Awesome technology – to make all that work so perfectly.
They did the final navigation visually, by recognising surface features.
And don’t forget they are going to try to fly a rotocraft on Mars, too.
If not familiar with the mission, for a bit of perspective, you may want to watch this quick CGI landing video
before watching the detailed landing overview with real life videos above.
Dimme wrote:
What the NASA/JPL scientists and engineers have pulled off is simply breathtaking.
Yes it is. We have to remind ourselves, though, that this landing process is almost the same (save for the higher landing precision and associated new instrumentation) as Curiosity performed already nine years ago on the same planet. The difference is we only had SD CGI video of the event then, now we have 4K (or at least HD) real video !
This and SpaceX’s Mars landing projects give humanity much needed long-term hope to look forward to, not dissimilar to what Apollo 8 did in December 1968.
I wish Perseverance at least as much time in service as its Curiosity partner has enjoyed! For one, the tires should do better mileage!
