NASA’s tiny Ingenuity helicopter now has 40 off-Earth flights beneath its belt.
The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity lifted off but once more on Thursday (Jan. 19), staying aloft for almost 92 seconds on a sortie that lined about 584 ft (178 meters) of horizontal distance.
The flight repositioned Ingenuity, transferring it from “Airfield Z” on the ground of Mars’ Jezero Crater to “Airfield Beta,” in keeping with the mission’s flight log (opens in new tab). That journey took the little chopper over some sand dunes, as imagery captured through the hop exhibits.
Associated: Soar over Mars rover tracks with Ingenuity helicopter (video)
Ingenuity landed with NASA’s car-sized Perseverance Mars rover in February 2021 contained in the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero, which hosted an enormous lake and a river delta billions of years in the past.
Perseverance is trying to find indicators of previous Mars life within the space and gathering dozens of samples that can be returned to Earth as early as 2033 by a joint NASA/European Area Company marketing campaign.
The plan requires Perseverance to ship these samples to a rocket-equipped NASA lander, which can launch the fabric to Mars orbit. Up there, the pattern container can be grabbed by a European probe, which can haul it to Earth. These different spacecraft are scheduled to launch within the mid- to late 2020s.
Over the previous few weeks, Perseverance has been dropping sample tubes in a “depot” on Jezero’s flooring. The depot is a backup, in case the rover is not wholesome sufficient to ship the samples to the lander later this decade. In that situation, two small, Ingenuity-like helicopters that launched aboard the lander will acquire the depot tubes one after the other.
Thus far, Perseverance has cached eight of a planned 10 sample tubes (opens in new tab) within the depot, which is in a patch of Jezero’s flooring the mission staff calls Three Forks.
Ingenuity is a expertise demonstrator designed to point out that aerial exploration is feasible on Mars regardless of the planet’s thin atmosphere. The helicopter’s prime mission lined simply 5 flights, which Ingenuity knocked out shortly after touching down inside Jezero.
The chopper then shifted into an prolonged mission, throughout which it has been pushing its flight capabilities and serving as a scout for Perseverance. The helicopter’s aerial observations assist the rover staff establish doubtlessly fascinating scientific targets and choose the perfect routes via the rugged landscapes on Jezero’s flooring.
Mike Wall is the creator of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a e-book concerning the seek for alien life. Comply with him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Comply with us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) and on Facebook (opens in new tab).
