By Chuck Woodbury
EDITOR AND MARS FAN
Not a single RVtravel.com reader was alive when the Wright Brothers flew the first powered aircraft in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. But, lucky for us, we are alive now to see the first controlled, powered flight on Mars! What an amazing feat! It lasted about 39 seconds, about three times longer than Wilbur and Orville’s initial achievement, which lasted only 12 seconds.
You can watch the flight of Mar’s Ingenuity Helicopter below.
The other amazing achievement of the week was that the Perseverance Rover’s science lab managed to pull oxygen out of the Martian atmosphere, which is about 96% carbon dioxide. In its first run, “Moxie” extracted about five grams of oxygen — the equivalent of about 10 minutes of breathable oxygen for one person. The device is designed to create up to 10 grams of oxygen per hour, but NASA expects that more powerful successors could be used in the future to produce far more breathable air.
How fascinating!
Chuck you could’ve volunteered to go there to record that flight. The one big thing that always makes me wonder, everything I’ve always heard about space travel was it was a giant vacuum once you left earth’s climate. So if it’s a giant vacuum how do parachutes work in a vacuum when the lander is coming down to the surface, and in the most recent video how does a helicopter fly in a vacuum? Inquiring minds want to know! Just a believable explanation will do, please NASA don’t give a 400 page hypothesis of how it works, just a believable answer.
Are you real???? Can you not look it up? :-/
A more puzzling thought is how some people can live past their teen’s….
WEB, he was only asking a question. Your reply makes no allowance for the abilities of bob P or the options he has in finding the answer on his own. There is no such thing as a silly question plus it shows that bob P has has an open inquisitive mind.
Mars has an atmosphere.