Video On Friday, NASA released images of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter flying farther and faster than ever.
The film was shot during the 25th Ingenious Flight on April 8 when it flew 704 meters at a speed of up to 5.5 meters per second.
In the accelerated images below, the vehicle climbs up to 10 meters, heads southwest, accelerates to a maximum speed in less than three seconds, and flies over the ripples of Martian sand and rock fields. before landing on relatively flat ground.
Youtube video
The navigation camera turns off when the aircraft is less than one meter from the landing to prevent dust from its navigation system.
The flights are designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which sends orders to the Perseverance Mars rover, which in turn transmits them to Ingenuity. Ingenuity uses on-board sensors to provide real-time data to its own navigation processor and main flight computer, which then allow it to react in real time.
On April 19, 2021, Ingenuity became the first aircraft to make a motorized, controlled flight to another planet. It now has 28 flights in its belt, meaning it has completed three flights since the April 8 footage was recorded, but as the videos take longer to return from Mars than the footage or other data, it can be understood the delay in making the information. public. The Jezero crater where Ingenuity landed in 2021 is about 505 million kilometers away.
Perseverance can reach transmission speeds of up to 2 Mb / s to its higher orbiters, which then transmit this data to Earth between 500 Kb / s and around 3 Mb / s, depending on the relative position between Mars and Earth. .
NASA has been busy this month re-establishing the connection between perseverance and ingenuity.
The two spacecraft lost communication from May 3 to 5 due to dust covering the helicopter’s solar panels, which prevented the batteries from being charged. The field programmable door array (FPGA) that handles the operating status of Ingenenu was turned off, as were its heaters. When it was online again, its clocks had restarted, which is not good for several reasons, one of which is that the FPGA manages heaters that protect electronics from the cold Martian nighttime temperatures.
NASA heeded a warning about future performance:
JPL’s ingenuity team leader Teddy Tzanetos wrote a status update on Friday, promising that the 29th flight of the ingenuity could take place in the next sunshine or Martian days, “assuming that the activities of reactivation of ‘winter are completed nominally “.
Tzanetos also detailed how remarkable it is that this helicopter not only continues to operate, but also offers humans these 161.3 seconds of footage.
“After hundreds of suns and dozens of flights beyond the five initially planned flights, the solar-powered helicopter is in unexplored terrain. We are now operating far beyond our original design limits,” Tzanetos said. ®