NASA’s Perseverance rover simply caught one other glimpse of its pioneering robotic cousin.
The car-sized Perseverance snapped a photograph not too long ago of the Ingenuity helicopter because the 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) rotorcraft sat atop a Crimson Planet sand dune.
“The #MarsHelicopter and I are nearer collectively than we have been shortly, and guess who I noticed resting on a dune between flights. Are you able to consider Ingenuity is gearing up for Flight #39?” the Perseverance workforce said via Twitter (opens in new tab) on Wednesday (Jan. 11), in a publish that featured a photograph of the little chopper.
Associated: Soar over Mars rover tracks with Ingenuity helicopter (video)
Ingenuity and Perseverance landed collectively inside Mars‘ Jezero Crater in February 2021. The 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero hosted a giant lake and a river delta way back, and Perseverance is scouring the realm for indicators of historic life on Mars.
The six-wheeled robotic can be amassing and caching dozens of samples for future return to Earth. For the previous few weeks, Perseverance has been caching some of its sample tubes in a “depot” in a patch of Jezero’s flooring that the mission workforce calls Three Forks.
Perseverance has to this point deposited six of a planned 10 sample tubes (opens in new tab) within the Three Forks depot, which serves as a backup in case the rover is not wholesome sufficient to haul materials to a future NASA lander later this decade. A rocket aboard that lander will launch the samples to Mars orbit, the place they will be picked up by a European spacecraft and hauled again to Earth. The samples might land right here as early as 2033.
The depot samples are doubles; Perseverance is protecting a set of fabric drilled from the identical goal rocks on its physique. If want be, two Ingenuity-like helicopters that may launch with the long run lander will fly over to Three Forks and seize the pattern tubes there one after the other.
Ingenuity is at the moment serving as a scout for Perseverance, serving to the rover workforce decide the most effective routes via the tough Jezero panorama and determine promising outcrops for in-depth examine.
This work is a part of the chopper’s prolonged mission. Not lengthy after touchdown, Ingenuity aced its major five-flight marketing campaign, exhibiting that powered flight is feasible within the skinny Martian atmosphere.
Ingenuity carried out its thirty ninth Martian flight on Wednesday, overlaying 459 ft (140 meters) of floor over the course of practically 79 seconds. So far, the chopper has flown a total of 25,690 ft (7,830 m) on Mars and stayed airborne for greater than 64 minutes, in line with the mission’s flight log (opens in new tab).
Perseverance has captured footage of Ingenuity earlier than. The rover snapped images of the chopper simply after it deployed onto Jezero’s flooring, for instance, and in addition recorded video of Ingenuity’s 13th flight, which happened in September 2021.
Mike Wall is the writer 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).
