// block 679765 · space · 19 April 2021
Ingenuity flies on Mars
The moment this block marks: Ingenuity's liftoff in Jezero Crater, 12:33 local solar time on Mars, 19 April 2021, 07:34:00 UTC. The first block mined after it is block 679,765, 19 April 2021, 07:40:34 UTC.
Perseverance had brought a passenger to Mars: Ingenuity, a solar-powered helicopter weighing 1.8 kilograms, built to find out whether anything could fly in an atmosphere with about one per cent of the pressure at the surface of Earth. On 19 April 2021, two months after the landing, it made its first attempt on the floor of Jezero Crater.
At 03:34 EDT, a little after midday in the local solar time of Mars, its rotors lifted it off the ground. It climbed to three metres, held a steady hover for thirty seconds and came back down, after 39.1 seconds in the air: the first powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet. The patch of ground was named Wright Brothers Field, after the pioneers of powered flight on Earth.
The team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California could not watch. The data went from the helicopter to Perseverance, then from the rover to Earth, and reached them at 06:46 EDT, more than three hours after the flight. Ingenuity had been planned for a handful of test flights over a month; it went on flying long after.
This page marks the flight itself, on Mars, rather than the moment the news reached Earth. The first block mined after the liftoff, block 679,765, came six and a half minutes later, at 07:40:34 UTC: Ingenuity was already back on the ground, and no one on Earth knew yet that it had flown. Its hash, like every hash, can be checked on any node.
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