The NASA deployed its Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter to Mars to study the Red Planet’s terrain and atmosphere. Several advances have been made, in a key mission for the American aerospace agency and, of course, for humanity.
Ingenuity made it possible to achieve a new Mars flight record, reported this week by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from NASA: the maximum altitude of 14 meters above the surface.
The previous one was 12 meters.
The 35th mission, carried out last Saturday, lasted 52 seconds, covering a distance of almost 15 meters.
As noted Digital Trends, This record was reached 11 days after another, the shortest flight in aviation history on Mars: 4.8 meters high for 18 seconds.
The objective of this mission was to test two new capabilities of Ingenuity: the avoidance of landing risks and the use of digital altitude mapping for navigation.
This is how Ingenuity, NASA’s Mars helicopter, works.
Ingenuity serves as a technology demonstrator for location scouting, helping Perseverance find the best routes. It is a 1.8 kilogram drone with 220 watts of electrical power and 1.2 meter tip-to-tip rotors.
The solar panel charges the lithium-ion batteries, providing enough power for a 90-second flight per Martian day.
Its flight environment is that of a thin atmosphere, less than 1% denser than that of Earth.
Since February 18, 2021, Ingenuity, accompanied by the Perseverance rover, has been in the Jezero crater. Its first flight took place on April 19 of the same year, take off 3 meters from the ground, hover briefly to turn and land.
“His technical demonstration being finished”, notes the NASA“Ingenuity is moving into a new demonstration phase of operations to explore how future rovers and airborne explorers can work together.”