Google NASA Ingenuity To Fly The Tiny Helicopter

NASA's historic first flight of a helicopter on Mars was celebrated this week by Google's search engine. If you head to Google now and type in "Ingenuity" or "Ingenuity NASA", you'll find yourself on the business end of a fun little animation of sorts. Make sure you're using a Chrome web browser to do it, and it'll most likely work best if you're on a desktop computer.

This little flier is the latest in a line of browser Easter Eggs that Google's dropped inside their Google search engine over the past several decades. Once the company had more than moderate success with making the entire world use their web browser, they had the ability to create web experience they could be reasonably sure would work for most users. Now, a fun little treat like this has the potential to be newsworthy in and of itself.

Meanwhile, NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter actually did, indeed, fly on Mars. The success of this flight was live streamed courtesy of NASA's next-level monitoring and broadcasting abilities. Take a peek at the recording of said live event below:

Another fun tidbit was literally attached to the underside of the helicopter as it made flight, too. One very tiny piece of the material used on the Wright Brothers flyer was attached to the helicopter before it was sent to Mars. That plane's parts have been taking flight for generations!

Take a peek at the timeline below to learn more about Ingenuity and the various reasons why this flight was and is historic. The ways in which humanity is expanding efforts to research other planets – particularly Mars – are continuing to grow more wild all the time. Also take a peek at how we'll return to the moon, and from there, send humans to the Red Planet.