NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter has taken flight once more, staying aloft for almost a minute this previous weekend on its thirty third extraterrestrial sortie.
Ingenuity, which is part of NASA’s life-seeking Perseverance rover mission, took to the skies of Mars on Saturday (Sept. 24), attaining a flight of simply over 55 seconds. The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) rotorcraft soared roughly 33 toes (10 meters) within the air and moved about 365 ft (111 meters) earlier than alighting in a brand new location, based on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which manages the missions of each Ingenuity and Perseverance.
“Should you look intently at this picture, you’ll see Ingenuity’s leg and tiny shadow,” JPL officers said via Twitter on Tuesday (opens in new tab) (Sept. 27).
Ingenuity helps Perseverance discover Jezero Crater, which hosted a lake and a river delta within the historic previous. Later within the 2020s, NASA and the European Area Company collectively plan to launch a sample-return mission to the area, which is able to use helicopters very similar to Ingenuity to select up samples gathered by Perseverance and haul them to a rocket for a launch again to Earth.
The group has framed the sample-return mission, and Perseverance’s cache of samples, as essential to assist perceive the historical past of the Purple Planet and the potential for life on Mars.
Perseverance, in the meantime, met some challenges whereas making an attempt to carry out a rock abrasion earlier within the week. A blog post (opens in new tab) Wednesday (Sept. 28) from JPL mentioned the rock, nicknamed “Chiniak,” utterly broke aside after the Martian floor reacted in an sudden approach to Perseverance’s instruments.
“Whereas we needed to forgo abrasion proximity science on this goal, we gained details about the cohesiveness and energy of the rock and had the chance to watch and examine each freshly damaged and weathered rock surfaces,” Eleanor Moreland, a Ph.D. scholar at Rice College, wrote within the submit.
“Due to the short work of the science and engineers, a brand new goal was chosen for a profitable abrasion simply a few days later,” Moreland added.
Observe Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
