NASA conducted its first flight on another planet early Monday morning, a short hop for a small chopper named Ingenuity which demonstrated technology that could prove critical to the future of space exploration.

The four-pound vehicle ascended to about 10 feet above the surface of the red planet for about 40 seconds, before descending back to the ground.

The helicopter arrived on Mars along with the Perseverance rover on Feb.

NASA has made history by successfully flying the mini helicopter Ingenuity on Mars, the first powered flight on another planet.

Here are some key things to know.

Proof of concept

The rotorcraft's first flight lasted 39.1 seconds as Ingenuity lifted itself to a height of 10 feet (three meters) and then returned to the Martian surface.

While it does have the capacity to fly for 90 seconds and cover a distance of up to 980 feet (300 meters), its test runs are intentionally of limited scope as they are meant to prove only that the technology works.

Ingenuity is not gathering scientific data about Mars or aiding in the search for past microbial life.

Previous technology demonstrations include the Mars Pathfinder rover, Sojourner, which was the first ever rover to explore another planet in 1997.

It is hoped that one day, future aircraft can help revolutionize exploration of celestial bodies by going further and faster than rovers, and reaching areas hard to access by land.

On April 21, 1908, near Earth's North Pole, the Arctic explorer Frederick Albert Cook scrawled in his diary a memorable phrase: "We were the only pulsating creatures in a dead world of ice." These words may soon take on new significance for humankind in another dead world of hidden ice, submerged beneath the red sand of its frigid deserts. This dead world is Mars, and the desert is the planet's mid-latitude region known as Arcadia Planitia.

In the weeks following its launch in early 2006, when NASA's New Horizons was still close to home, it took just minutes to transmit a command to the spacecraft, and hear back that the onboard computer received and was ready to carry out the instructions.

As New Horizons crossed the solar system, and its distance from Earth jumped from millions to billions of miles, that time between contacts grew from a few minutes to several hours. And on April 17 at 12:42 UTC (or April 17 at 8:42 a.m. EDT), New Horizons will reach a rare deep-space milepost—50 astronomical units from the sun, or 50 times farther from the sun than Earth is.

New Horizons is just the fifth spacecraft to reach this great distance, following the legendary Voyagers 1 and 2 and their predecessors, Pioneers 10 and 11.