MADRID, 7 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) –
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter broke its own in-flight altitude record over the red planet on its 35th flight, Dec. 3, reaching 14 meters in height.
The previous record for the small 1.8 kilo helicopter was 12 meters achieved on three previous flights to Mars, JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) reported on its Twitter account.
Ingenuity covered regarding 15 meters of horizontal distance on Saturday’s flight, which lasted 52 seconds.. The helicopter has now traveled a total of 7,407 meters and has remained in the air for 59.9 minutes in its 35 sorties to Mars, according to the mission’s flight log.
Ingenuity landed NASA’s Perseverance rover on the floor of Jezero Crater in February 2021. The helicopter soon deployed from the rover’s belly and embarked on a campaign to prove that powered flight is possible in the thin atmosphere of Mars. .
That initial technology demonstration phase lasted less than a month and consisted of just five sorties. But NASA granted Ingenuity a mission extension, keeping the helicopter airborne. His current goals are focused on powering the flight of the Red Planet and conducting reconnaissance for Perseverance, informa Space.com.
Saturday’s flight was Ingenuity’s first since Nov. 22 and only the second it has made since a major software update. That update, which took several weeks to install, “gives Ingenuity two important new capabilities: avoidance of hazards when landing and the use of digital elevation maps to aid navigation,” mission team members wrote in a blog post late last month.
