Before the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, prototype ‘Orville’ took flight above the Oregon Coast

NASA is poised to make aerospace history on Sunday night with the planned launch of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. It will be the first flight by a controlled aircraft on another planet beyond Earth.

Decades of planning and prototype testing have led up to this moment. And a piece of that history happened on the Oregon Coast.

“The problem on any planet is the same as Earth. If you want to go around a bunch, you have to go in orbit. To be in orbit, your altitudes are significantly higher than if you could fly,” said Kevin Tucker, president of aerospace engineering company Near Space Corporation. “If you really want to get sensors in close proximity where you can get more measurements on both the ground and the atmosphere, you have to go lower.”

In the years leading up to Sunday’s launch, scientists with NASA have been trying to figure out if it’s possible to fly an aircraft in the low gravity and thin atmosphere of Mars. And before there was the Ingenuity helicopter, there was the NASA 731 glider, nicknamed “Orville.”