NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory early adopter of digital wind technology for ensuring flight safety of Mars helicopter Ingenuity.

Excerpt from NASA-JPL Ingenuity Preflight Press Conference April 9, 2021

Moral of the story: just relax on a beach in Sardinia, watch seagulls soaring in place in gusty winds, get the idea of testing autonomous vehicles in free flight using pixelated wind facilities, get brilliant engineers excited (Guillaume Catry, Luca Jacopo Bardazzi, Sergio Márquez, Nicolas Bosson), share the concept with the right people (Mory Gharib), et voilà.

WindShape designed and built for Caltech the very first large-scale digital wind facility, which was inaugurated on October 24, 2017: “It is in many ways the wind tunnel of the 2020s” (Thomas Rosenbaum, Caltech President).

Early adopters include EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), ENAC – Ecole Nationale de l’Aviation Civile, Nanyang Technological University, RCbenchmark , streamwise gmbh, OptiTrack, NUAIR and many more.

Photo credits: NASA/JPL, WindShape