NASA - Mars Helicopter Ingenuity logo.
Feb 19, 2023
The little chopper traveled 1,280 feet (390 meters) during its Thursday (Feb. 16) sortie.
Image above: A photograph taken by the Perseverance rover of the Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars in April 2021, just after the rover deployed the chopper. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter flew yet again on Thursday (Feb. 16), covering more Red Planet ground than it had on a single sortie in nearly a year.
The flight was the 43rd overall (opens in new tab) for the 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity, which landed on the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater with the Perseverance rover in February 2021.
This latest hop covered 1,280 feet (390 meters) of Red Planet ground, according to Ingenuity's flight log (opens in new tab). Ingenuity hadn't flown that far since April 29, 2022, when it traveled 1,371 feet (418 m) across Jezero's floor.
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That April 29 hop didn't set a record, however; Ingenuity's longest-ever flight occurred three weeks earlier, on April 8, when the little robot put 2,310 feet (710 m) on its odometer.
During its 43 Mars flights to date, Ingenuity has covered a total of 28,968 feet (8,829 m), according to the mission flight log — nearly 5.5 miles (8.9 kilometers). That's quite impressive for a technology demonstration that was originally supposed to fly just five times on the Red Planet.
Ingenuity long ago transitioned out of that original mission. The rotorcraft is now serving as a scout for Perseverance, which is searching for signs of past Mars life and collecting and caching dozens of samples for future return to Earth.
MARS Helicopter Ingenuity has completed Flight 43 in the Martian Sky
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 NASA 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.
More About Ingenuity
The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was built by JPL, which also manages the project for NASA Headquarters. It is supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, provided significant flight performance analysis and technical assistance during Ingenuity’s development. AeroVironment Inc., Qualcomm, and SolAero also provided design assistance and major vehicle components. Lockheed Space designed and manufactured the Mars Helicopter Delivery System.
At NASA Headquarters, Dave Lavery is the program executive for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.
For more information about Ingenuity: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter
Images (mentioned),Video, Text, Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space.com/By Mike Wall/Orbiter.ch Aerospace/Roland Berga.
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