NASA’s helicopter flight on Mars made history. Here’s how Kansas City’s Garmin helped

Monday’s inaugural flight of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars made history as the first controlled flight on another planet. But it also represented Garmin’s first foray into the extraterrestrial market.

The helicopter, attached to the Perseverance rover that landed on Mars in February, included a small sensor sold by Olathe-based Garmin International. Called the LIDAR-Lite v3, the lightweight sensor is essentially an altimeter that measures distance. In the case of the NASA helicopter, the sensor measures how high the aircraft lifts beyond the Martian surface.

But on Earth, the sensor, which retails for $130, is used on crossbows to help hunters and on rangefinders to aid golfers.

Best known for pioneering the GPS market, Garmin has created a vast array of electronic products that span the aviation, marine and personal fitness markets. But astronautics is all new.

Bob Lewis, a Garmin design engineer who developed the sensor, said it may open the door for more of the company’s technology to make its way into space.

“I’m hoping over time that more and more products that are basically available to the average hobbyists, for example, could be used in various space applications,” he said.

A decade ago, Lewis cofounded PulsedLight, which sold to Garmin in 2016. He said his optical distance sensor was originally created with intended use in robotics, but has been used in a variety of applications since.

“This was sort of created in my den a decade ago, so it’s sort of cool just to see how it’s traveled over the years,” he said. “And also just the fact that it’s such a first of having a helicopter fly on another planet. That’s a real exciting thing.”

The Mars Perseverance rover was built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The vehicle was dispatched to the red planet to search for signs of ancient life. In addition to collecting data about the climate and geology of Mars, the rover was designed to collect and package rock samples that in a later mission will be returned to Earth for further research.

The helicopter Ingenuity was created to demonstrate the ability of powered, controlled flight in the extreme conditions of Mars, which has an extremely thin atmosphere and temperatures that can plunge to -130 degrees Fahrenheit.

NASA essentially purchased Garmin’s sensor off the shelf. The company didn’t know its intended use for some time as the space agency asked questions about how the sensor would perform in a vacuum or in extreme temperatures.

“We didn’t really understand what they were trying to do” at first, Lewis said.

Garmin sells a small line of sensors. But they’re highly specialized products, not widely used consumer electronics like the company’s fitness trackers or navigation devices.

“This isn’t something where anybody can just pick one up and play with it,” said Jon Seitz, technical lead design engineer for Garmin. “You have to design this into some overall larger system.

“You get kind of a thrill when you see somebody use one out in the wild. But for NASA to pick one up and shoot it into space and put it on Mars, that’s a little bit bigger thrill.”