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The Mars helicopter Ingenuity is about to make history in the skies of another world
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The Mars helicopter Ingenuity is about to make history in the skies of another world

NASA is about to make history on the Red Planet with the first controlled, helicopter flight on another world.

Science & Tech

This Sunday (April 11), NASA's Mars Helicopter Ingenuity is expected to make its first-ever flight on Mars, a historic liftoff for the 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) craft. This flight will come 118 years after the Wright Brothers made their first successful powered flight on Earth and 60 years after the first human spaceflight, which was made by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin April 12, 1961.

"It feels important," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for the science mission directorate, told Space.com in an interview ahead of the flight.

"I'm sure that the Wright brothers that day, if you did an interview there and said, 'Hey, could you imagine somebody flying on a plane from DC to LA,' they would have said, 'You're kidding me!" Zurbuchen, who had just flown from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles, said.