Mars helicopter Ingenuity goes long distance in third flight on Red Planet

Occupy it a hat trick on the Red Planet for NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity.

The 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) chopper aced its third-ever Martian flight early this morning (April 25), along side to its already spectacular resume.

“Third flight within the historical past books.” officers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California wrote on Twitter. “Our #MarsHelicopter continues to pickle data, flying faster and farther. The house chopper is demonstrating serious capabilities that might per chance per chance well enable the addition of an aerial dimension to future missions to Mars & beyond.”

And these days’s sortie became vastly more complex than Ingenuity’s old two flights, which took articulate on Monday (April 19) and Thursday (April 22), respectively. On its ancient, 39-second debut hop — the first powered, controlled flight for an airplane on a world beyond Earth — the solar-powered helicopter went straight up and down and reached a maximum altitude of about 16.5 feet (5 meters). 

Ingenuity went about that excessive on flight quantity two but stayed up for nearly 52 seconds and moved facet-to-facet a entire of 13 feet (4 m).

Video: Zoom in on Ingenuity helicopter’s third flight on Mars

“For the third flight, we’re focused on the identical altitude, but we’ll initiate issues up a minute bit, too, increasing our max airspeed from 0.5 meters per second to 2 meters per second (about 4.5 mph) as we head 50 meters (164 feet) north and return to land at Wright Brothers Area,” Ingenuity chief pilot Håvard Grip, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, wrote in a blog put up Friday (April 23). (The Ingenuity group named the chopper’s flight zone after aviation pioneers Wilbur and Orville Wright.)

“We’re planning for a entire flight time of about 80 seconds and a entire distance of 100 meters (330 feet),” he added. 

At around 10: 15 a.m. EDT (1415 GMT) these days, data began streaming in to mission preserve watch over at JPL confirming that Ingenuity had accomplished these instructions successfully.

Communications to and from Ingenuity are relayed through NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is serving a key give a boost to and observation characteristic for the helicopter. The two robots landed collectively inner Mars’ 28-mile-extensive (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, and Ingenuity deployed from the car-sized rover’s belly on April 3, kicking off the sizzling month-long flight campaign.

That campaign is designed to point out that aerial exploration is probably on Mars, which has an ambiance most attention-grabbing-wanting 1% as dense as that of Earth at sea stage. Ingenuity’s success might per chance per chance well pave the system for the huge consume of rotorcraft on future Red Planet missions, with Mars helicopters serving as scouts for rovers and furthermore gathering data themselves, NASA officers possess mentioned.

Ingenuity just isn’t doing any science work; it be a technology demonstration, after all. But the helicopter does possess a 13-megapixel color digicam, which has snapped chronicle, unprecedented photos of Perseverance’s tracks from above.

The Ingenuity group hopes to flit two more times ahead of the flight window closes in early Would possibly per chance. And these perfect two sorties is frequently “in actuality adventurous,” Ingenuity project manager MiMi Aung, furthermore of JPL, mentioned all over a info convention earlier this month, stressing that she and her colleagues are alive to to push the minute airplane’s limits.

That shall be it for Ingenuity. There might per chance be no negotiating a longer flight window, as a result of Perseverance must originate focusing by itself science mission rapidly. That mission has two critical duties: making an strive to search out indicators of gentle Mars existence inner Jezero, which hosted a lake and river delta system serve, and collecting samples for future return to Earth.

Mike Wall is the creator of “Out There” (Massive Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book relating to the search alien existence. Apply him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Apply us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Fb.