NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter retains elevating the bar for Pink Planet flight.
The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity soared 46 ft (14 meters) above Mars’ pink grime on Saturday (Dec. 3), setting a brand new altitude report on its thirty fifth off-Earth flight.
The little chopper’s earlier report was 39 ft (12 m), achieved on three earlier Mars flights. (You may 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 report, 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 point out 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, protecting the rotorcraft flying. Its present goals heart on pushing the envelope of Pink Planet flight and performing reconnaissance for Perseverance.
The rover is trying to find indicators of historical 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 amassing and caching a sequence of samples, which a joint NASA-European House 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 staff members wrote in a blog post late last month (opens in new tab).
Ingenuity coated about 49 ft (15 m) of horizontal distance on Saturday’s flight, which lasted 52 seconds. The helicopter has now traveled a total of 24,302 ft (7,407 m) and stayed aloft for 59.9 minutes on its 35 Mars sorties, based on the mission flight log.
Mike Wall is the writer 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).
