Igor works for “Aerovironment” in California and is part of the Ingenuity development team. He has created the solar battery, propeller blades and the welding shaft on which all the nodes and communications are assembled.
President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky tweeted about the launch of the drone Ingenuity: "Congratulations on the first drone flight on Mars! I am proud that among its developers is Ukrainian Igor Panchenko". The complexity of the Ingenuity design and the launch process is that the density of the Mars atmosphere is only 1% of the Earth’s atmosphere. Therefore, for a drone to launch on Mars, the rotational speed of the propellers was calculated at 2400 turnovers per minute, which is eight times higher than the rpm under the same load in the Earth's atmosphere.
The importance of this event is that it is the first flight of an aircraft controlled from another planet.
"We have cutting-edge experts, technologies, a well-established system of space education. These are achievements that we must use to develop space activities”, — said Vladimir Taftai, the head of the Space Agency of Ukraine, in an interview with the resource Ukrinform. The President of Ukraine notes on his Twitter that the development of satellite "Sich-3.0" is proceeding according to plan and in the near future, a launch will be performed.
As part of the programme to strengthen the status of Ukraine as a space Power, on 9 of April Ukraine joined the NASA Lunar development programme "Artemda". The Space agency of Ukraine bets on investments of private companies and foreign partners.
Let us remind that in 2019 NASA announced the launch of the investing-in-ukraine/service-for-investors/strategy-development/" rel="dofollow">strategy of the Moon development "Artemida", which is aimed at international cooperation of scientists and commercial partners. And Ukraine became the 8-th State to sign a memorandum of cooperation with NASA.
