The little chopper traveled 1,280 feet (390 meters) during its Thursday (Feb. 16) sortie.
On Thursday (Feb. 16), N.A.S.A’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter took to the skies once more, covering more ground on the Red Planet than it had in any one sortie in almost a year.
The 4-pound (1.8-kg) Ingenuity rover, which landed on the surface of Mars’ Jezero Crater with the Perseverance rover in February 2021, completed its 43rd overall mission with this one.
According to Ingenuity’s flight log, this most recent hop traversed 1,280 feet (390 meters) of Red Planet ground (opens in new tab). Since April 29, 2022, when it flew 1,371 feet (418 m) across Jezero’s surface, innovation has not gone that distance.
The little robot traveled 2,310 feet (710 m) on its odometer on its longest flight, which was on April 8, three weeks prior to the hop on April 29.
According to the mission flight log, Ingenuity has flown to Mars 43 times, covering a distance of 28,968 feet (8,829 m), or almost 5.5 miles (8.9 kilometers). That’s really amazing for a technological demonstration that was only intended to fly five times on Mars.
Ingenuity has long since abandoned its initial goal. Now acting as a scout for Perseverance, the rotorcraft is looking for evidence of past Martian life while also gathering and caching a number of samples for eventual return to Earth.
Jezero is a great place to do such work, mission team members have said: The 28-mile-wide (45 km) crater hosted a big lake and a river delta billions of years ago.
Perseverance recently finished setting up a backup sample cache in a patch of Jezero that the rover team calls Three Forks. The 10 tubes in the Three Forks depot will be collected by Ingenuity-like helicopters late this decade if Perseverance isn’t healthy enough to deliver its onboard samples to a rocket-toting lander itself. That rocket will blast the samples to Mars orbit, where a spacecraft will snag them and haul them back to Earth, perhaps as early as 2033 — a sample-return campaign that N.A.S.A will undertake with the European Space Agency.
Perseverance is now beginning to climb up Jezero’s ancient delta formation, to explore this different and intriguing environment. The rover has put 9.05 miles (14.57 km) on its odometer since touching down, according to mission team members(opens in new tab).
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There(opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall(opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom(opens in new tab) or Facebook(opens in new tab).
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