The Aero Club of New England (ACONE) will present the 2022 Godfrey L. Cabot Award to the NASA Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Team in Boston, MA on June 24, 2022.
The Ingenuity Team will be honored with the prestigious Cabot Award in recognition of their history making flight of April 19, 2021, when Ingenuity became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet.
The Mars Helicopter/Ingenuity Team will accept the Award at a luncheon on Friday, June 24th, at the Harvard Club in Boston, MA.
The flight at Mars is challenging because the Red Planet has a significant lower gravity — one third that of Earth’s, and an extremely thin atmosphere with only 1% the density at the surface as compared to our planet.
The rotorcraft’s flights are autonomous, piloted by on board guidance, navigation, and control algorithms developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Because data must be sent to and returned from the Red Planet over millions of miles using orbiting satellites, and NASA’s Deep Space Network, Ingenuity is not flown with a joystick, and flights are not observable from Earth in real time. To operate at Mars, the rotorcraft requires the Perseverance rover to assist in communications back and forth from Earth.
The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter experiment has embarked on a new operations demonstration phase, performing reconnaissance to aid the Perseverance rover, and exploring how aerial vehicles can benefit future exploration of Mars and other worlds.
The Cabot Award, named to commemorate Dr. Godfrey L. Cabot (now deceased), is presented annually by ACONE to an individual or team who has made unique and unparalleled contributions to encourage and advance aviation and space flight.
Previous recipients include Igor Sikorsky, Gen. Curtis LeMay, Gen. James Doolittle, Space Ship One Team, Col. Eileen Collins, Harrison Ford, astronauts and notable others.
The Aero Club of New England (ACONE), the first aero club in the Americas, was organized in Boston on January 20, 1902, nearly two full years prior to the first flight of the Wright brothers on December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hill, North Carolina.
