“We have a large collection of material from when Orville was trying to get the pieces of the Wright Flyer III back,” says Haney. “[The sample on Ingenuity] is slightly discolored with age, but in very good condition. Knowing NASA wanted something the size of a postage stamp, I cut a little extra, just in case they needed a little excess fabric for testing purposes.”
It turns out that was a good move.
“Anything you fly has to be sterilized, so we had to cut off a little Wright Flyer fabric sample, run it through an autoclave, and make sure it didn’t burn up before we put the larger fabric piece in the autoclave,” says Bob Balaram, Ingenuity’s chief engineer at JPL. “Everything we send into space has to be checked for outgassing, so it doesn’t contaminate something else. So, you heat it to address the contamination control problem — to dry up the gas — but it also kills bugs, which addresses the planetary protection problem. Remember: This is an astrobiological mission. NASA is looking for signs of past life. The last thing you want is to go to Mars, bring back spores you had taken from Earth, then think they’re martian spores.”
The painstaking care placed into sterilizing one tiny patch of timeworn 1903 Wright Flyer fabric is emblematic of the painstaking care put into every aspect of the Ingenuity mission over the past 6 years. Ingenuity’s flight date had to be bumped twice in recent weeks before NASA saw success today. But all the while, the entire Ingenuity team was channeling the spirit of the Wright brothers, the Dayton pioneers who, after 6 years of tireless work and countless setbacks, finally took flight in 1903.
“This is a Wright brothers moment,” says Amanda Wright Lane, the Wright brothers’ great-grandniece. “When I first thought about the name of the rover, Perseverance, and the name of the little helicopter, Ingenuity, all I could think about was Uncle Orv and Uncle Wil. I thought, ‘Isn’t it appropriate that, in some way, they are a part of this mission?’ They’ve always been a part of those ideas — perseverance, ingenuity. Always.”