Photo: NASA
Absolutely every little piece of flying machinery on Earth comes with a call sign. Depending on a number of factors, the call signs can be anything, but they generally derive from the aircraft’s registration number or its name. The result turns into the moniker each aircraft is known to others, including traffic controllers, while flying about.
Presently, there is only one flying human-made machinery on Mars, and giving it a call sign might be seen as something of an overkill, all things considered. But NASA did it anyway because having a call sign is cool, and having an ICAO designator is even cooler.
ICAO is short for International Civil Aviation Organization, and that would be the organization responsible for pretty much everything that goes on in Earth's airspace. It has, of course, no official jurisdiction over there on Mars, but who cares about that when this little piece of machinery will certainly be in the history books once engineers are done with it?
Shortly after the helicopter’s first flight on April 19, the man responsible for overseeing its operation, Håvard Grip, announced the little piece of hardware was given the call sign Ingenuity and the designator IGY by the ICAO. And IGY is how we’ll probably refer to it from time to time in our coverage of its future exploits.
Ingenuity is not the single piece of alien machine to receive such a pretentious moniker. The machine that carried it to the Red Planet, Perseverance, was gifted with a vehicle identification number just like all cars have on Earth. It is made up of numbers and letters assigned by the Society of Automotive Engineers that reference everything from the type of vehicle and the year it was made to the planet of origin and the number of the rover mission that got it there.
ICAO is short for International Civil Aviation Organization, and that would be the organization responsible for pretty much everything that goes on in Earth's airspace. It has, of course, no official jurisdiction over there on Mars, but who cares about that when this little piece of machinery will certainly be in the history books once engineers are done with it?
Shortly after the helicopter’s first flight on April 19, the man responsible for overseeing its operation, Håvard Grip, announced the little piece of hardware was given the call sign Ingenuity and the designator IGY by the ICAO. And IGY is how we’ll probably refer to it from time to time in our coverage of its future exploits.
Ingenuity is not the single piece of alien machine to receive such a pretentious moniker. The machine that carried it to the Red Planet, Perseverance, was gifted with a vehicle identification number just like all cars have on Earth. It is made up of numbers and letters assigned by the Society of Automotive Engineers that reference everything from the type of vehicle and the year it was made to the planet of origin and the number of the rover mission that got it there.
Google News