NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter has taken to alien skies yet again.
The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity conducted its fifty fifth flight on Aug. 12, covering a good little bit of Red Planet ground in the method.
“Ingenuity has now successfully flown on Mars 55 times! On its latest flight, the #MarsHelicopter flew 866 feet (264 m) for 143 seconds at a height of 32.8 feet (10 m),” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which manages the little chopper’s mission, wrote via X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday (Aug. 16).
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Those figures aren’t records for the rotorcraft, by the way in which: Ingenuity has reached a maximum altitude of 59 feet (18 m), and it flew a whopping 2,310 feet (704 m) horizontally on certainly one of its sorties.
Ingenuity has now covered a complete of 41,024 feet (12,503 m) of ground and stayed aloft for nearly 98 minutes on its 55 flights, mission team members wrote on the chopper’s flight log.
Ingenuity landed on the ground of Mars’ Jezero Crater in February 2021 together with NASA’s Perseverance rover. The chopper’s foremost goal was to indicate that aerial exploration is feasible on Mars despite the planet’s thin atmosphere.
Ingenuity did just that over the course of 5 flights in April and early May of 2021. NASA then granted an prolonged mission, during which the helicopter is serving as a scout for the life-hunting, sample-caching Perseverance.
The little drone’s success may lead to an additional opening of the Red Planet’s skies. NASA plans to send two Ingenuity-like helicopters to Mars later this decade, to assist collect Perseverance’s samples (if vital) for a planned return to Earth.
The agency also goals to develop greater and more ambitious Mars helicopters, which could gather a wide range of scientific data on their very own while exploring the planet’s skies.