NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter retains elevating the bar for Purple Planet flight.
The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity soared 46 toes (14 meters) above Mars’ crimson dust on Saturday (Dec. 3), setting a brand new altitude file on its thirty fifth off-Earth flight.
The little chopper’s earlier file was 39 toes (12 m), achieved on three earlier Mars flights. (You will get a rundown of all 35 Ingenuity sorties within the mission’s flight log (opens in new tab).)
Associated: Soar over Mars rover tracks with Ingenuity helicopter (video)
An all-time excessive for the #MarsHelicopter!Ingenuity accomplished Flight 35 over the weekend and set a brand new max altitude file, hitting 46 ft (14 meters) above the Martian floor. See extra stats within the flight log: https://t.co/7DMHj9LkNX pic.twitter.com/qAj5H9Z68CDecember 6, 2022
Ingenuity landed with NASA’s Perseverance rover on the ground of Jezero Crater in February 2021. The helicopter quickly deployed from the rover’s stomach and launched into a marketing campaign to indicate that powered flight is feasible within the skinny Mars atmosphere.
That preliminary technology-demonstrating phase lasted lower than a month and consisted of simply 5 sorties. However NASA quickly granted Ingenuity a mission extension, maintaining the rotorcraft flying. Its present aims middle on pushing the envelope of Purple Planet flight and performing reconnaissance for Perseverance.
The rover is looking for indicators of historic Mars life on the ground of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero, which hosted a lake and a river delta billions of years in the past. Perseverance can also be gathering and caching a sequence of samples, which a joint NASA-European Area Company marketing campaign will return to Earth, maybe as early as 2033.
Saturday’s flight was the primary for Ingenuity since Nov. 22 and simply the second it has carried out since a major software update. That replace, which took a number of weeks to put in, “gives Ingenuity two main new capabilities: hazard avoidance when touchdown and the usage of digital elevation maps to assist navigate,” mission workforce members wrote in a blog post late last month (opens in new tab).
Ingenuity lined about 49 toes (15 m) of horizontal distance on Saturday’s flight, which lasted 52 seconds. The helicopter has now traveled a total of 24,302 toes (7,407 m) and stayed aloft for 59.9 minutes on its 35 Mars sorties, in line with the mission flight log.
Mike Wall is the creator of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a guide concerning the seek for alien life. Observe him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) and on Facebook (opens in new tab).
