Håvard Fjær Grip

Inside the hushed command center, Chief Pilot Håvard Grip starts announcing telemetry readouts that have abruptly begun rolling down his laptop’s screen: “Spinup. Takeoff. Climb. Hover. Descent. Landing. Touchdown. And spindown.”

Then: “Altimeter data confirms.” A heartbeat later, the soundtrack dissolves into an incoherent jumble of applause, shouts, and cheers.

Grip had just flown the first-ever powered aircraft on another planet, 173 million miles distant. His job title is robotics technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. At 12:34 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, a spindly, four-pound helicopter, designed by JPL with Grip’s engineering input and controlled by commands he wrote with C++ software, had launched from the surface of Mars. Named Ingenuity, it rose 10 feet, hovered, pivoted, then gently landed to conclude a 39.1-second flight. Onboard was a swatch from our own planet’s first powered aircraft; NASA promptly designated the launch site Wright Brothers Field.

Mars’s atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth’s. Ingenuity compensates with twin 4-foot coaxial rotors spinning at speeds approaching 3,000 rpm, some eight times faster than typical passenger helicopters on Earth. Its blades—curved foam scimitars wrapped in carbon-fiber skins—are hummingbird light but extraordinarily rigid.

Grip earned his doctorate in engineering cybernetics. He joined Ingenuity’s team in 2013, as the aerodynamics and flight control lead. He wrote the algorithms governing flight operations, then helped build and fly prototypes in JPL’s huge, 25-foot-long Space Simulator vacuum chamber: “For years, our team spent most of every day at the chamber, pumping out the air and backfilling it with CO2 to simulate the Martian atmosphere,” he recalls. “We basically lived there, doing countless flight control experiments.”

His experience both as a controls engineer and private pilot made him the ideal choice for Ingenuity’s chief pilot. “I’ve done deep-level theoretical research in academia. But I had also flown my Piper Cherokee 140 with sensors to develop real-world navigation algorithms. So being chief pilot seemed a good fit.”

Grip earned his pilot certificate while living in rural Washington. “It was a beautiful place for backcountry flying. The Cherokee is underpowered, tricycle gear, low-wing—not exactly a backcountry plane, but there were some very cool strips I was able to visit anyway. That was an absolute blast.”

Not surprisingly, flight planning on Mars parallels Earth’s: “There is a lot of prep work—weather, atmospheric density, terrain, waypoints, navigation and performance parameters.”

The video captured Grip’s reaction as telemetry confirmed Ingenuity’s flight: pleased but calm, focused on the readouts. “I felt relief. Others were jumping up and down, but I was motionless. Flying, and getting data—that defined it as a successful mission. I could finally check that box.”

As of press time, Ingenuity is still flying. Follow its progress:

mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter