Almost 118 years after the Wright brothers flew the first controlled airplane, NASA extended humankind’s successes in aviation to another planet. The Ingenuity helicopter became the first aircraft to fly on Mars, lasting 39.1 seconds in the air before touching back down on the planet’s surface.

In honor of Orville and Wilbur Wright’s accomplishments as pioneers of aviation, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for their Science Mission Directorate, announced that the Martian airfield on which Ingenuity’s flight took place will be named the Wright Brothers Field. Ingenuity also carries a small piece of the Wright brothers’ work; muslin fabric from the wings of the brothers’ Flyer 1 is connected to a cable underneath Ingenuity’s solar panel.

While the flight was originally scheduled for April 11th, it was postponed to resolve a command-sequence issue that the team found during the helicopter’s preflight checks. On April 19th at 3:34 a.m., a time NASA deemed to have optimal energy and flight conditions, the rotorcraft successfully completed its autonomous flight and landed safely back on Mars. The Ingenuity team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California waited in anticipation for confirmation of the helicopter’s flawless flight, which they received about 3 hours later.

Because data sent from the Red Planet requires time and the use of millions of miles’ worth of orbiting satellites, the flight was unobservable in live time. However, the Perseverance rover captured images and videos of Ingenuity’s memorable success from a safe distance. Similar to how Perseverance received flight instructions from JPL to send to Ingenuity, the rover was able to send back the footage it recorded of the flight to Earth.

NASA isn’t finished with Ingenuity just yet though. The tissue box-sized aircraft has even bigger plans for the upcoming weeks. Before Ingenuity’s experimentation period is over, the team aims for 4 more flights that will truly test how high the helicopter can fly.

“We have been thinking for so long about having our Wright brothers moment on Mars, and here it is. We will take a moment to celebrate our success and then take a cue from Orville and Wilbur regarding what to do next,” said MiMi Aung, the Ingenuity project manager at JPL. “History shows they got back to work—to learn as much as they could about their new aircraft—and so will we.”

Ingenuity’s historic flight has brought light to the possibility of future projects with more advanced helicopters that can be sent to the Red Planet. The rotorcraft has shown that despite Mars’s pressure that is a mere 1% of Earth’s pressure on the surface and gravity that is one-third of the Earth’s gravity, scientists can engineer aircrafts that are able to delve into further exploration of the planet.