The helicopter Ingenuity has now flown three times on Mars and has proven itself to be a dependable (for now) and potentially ground-breaking addition to Mars science.
Ingenuity, brought to Mars as part of the Perseverance rover landing, took off early Sunday morning on its third and most ambitious Martian mission yet. The 4-pound helicopter traveled a total of 330 feet laterally, stayed aloft for 80 seconds and reached a maximum speed of about 4.5 mph, handily breaking marks set on its previous two flights.
In the video above, you can see the helicopter taking off on the bottom left, crossing the screen, and then coming back a bit later to land in the same spot.
The “flight was what we planned for, and yet it was nothing short of amazing,” said Dave Lavery, the Ingenuity program executive at NASA Headquarters. “With this flight, we are demonstrating critical capabilities that will enable the addition of an aerial dimension to future Mars missions.”
If this capacity proves to be robust it will clearly have many positive implications for Mars science with successor rotorcraft — allowing scientists to quickly study areas surrounding a rover and to put their discoveries into larger geological contexts.
Ingenuity rover preparing to go airborne. The wings, legs and more were folded up for its long ride to Mars and then robotically unfurled on the Martian surface. (NASA)
The Mastcam-Z imager aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, which is parked at “Van Zyl Overlook” and serving as a communications base station, captured video of Ingenuity.
The Ingenuity team has been pushing the helicopter’s limits by adding instructions to capture more photos of its own – including from the color camera, which captured its first images on the second flight. As with everything else about these flights, the additional steps are meant to provide insights that could be used by future aerial missions.
The helicopter’s black-and-white navigation camera, meanwhile, tracks surface features below, and this flight put the onboard processing of these images to the test. Ingenuity’s flight computer, which autonomously flies the craft based on instructions sent up hours before data is received back on Earth, utilizes the same resources as the cameras.
If Ingenuity flies too fast, the flight algorithm can’t track surface features.
On Earth, NASA sought to simulate those conditions in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab vacuum chambers, which were filled with wispy air consisting primarily of carbon dioxide. … Read more
