Grab your hat while Mars’ helicopter takes us on another ride on the red planet. NASA released new images of Flight 25 of the Ingenuity helicopter, revealing the smallest and longest excursion of the small aircraft to date.
On April 18, NASA’s Mars Ingenuity helicopter covered a distance of 2,310 feet (704 meters) at a speed of 12 miles per hour (5.5 meters per second). The video of the flight was released on Friday as the team is currently preparing for the 29th flight to Mars.
“For our record flight, the ingenuity downhill navigation camera gave us an impressive sense of what it would feel like to slide 33 feet above the surface of Mars at 12 miles per hour,” said Teddy Tzanetos, head of NASA Jet Ingenuity Team. Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California said in a statement.
The video is a real lie. It starts about a second after the flight, after Ingenuity has already taken off the Martian surface. Once it reaches an altitude of 33 feet (10 meters), the helicopter begins to fly southwest. His rapidly passing shadow over the Martian ground seems to move with bold determination.
The aircraft quickly accelerates to its maximum speed in three seconds of flight. The seemingly frantic footage accelerated to about five times the normal speed, reducing the flight from 161.3 seconds to less than 35 seconds.
The grainy video still allows us to marvel at the desert-like terrain of Mars, which begins with gentle ripples of sand, then becomes more rocky in the middle of the footage, before softening again and providing a place for safe landing for Ingenuity.
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The black and white camera facing down from the helicopter was designed to cut when the helicopter is 3 feet (1 meter) from the surface, to prevent dust from lodging in the navigation system.
The ingenuity may have started as a companion to the Perseverance rover, but this little helicopter has been proven time and time again. On April 19, 2021, Ingenuity became the first motorized aircraft to take off from the surface of another planet. The 19-inch (48 cm) and 4-pound (1.8 kg) helicopter was designed to test a whole new way of exploring alien worlds, and has far exceeded all expectations by recording 28 flights over Mars, the original mission. plan only for five flights.
Despite recent communication problems between Ingenuity and its companion six-wheeled rover, the helicopter was recently designed to aid Perseverance in its exploration of Mars, flying overhead to determine the best routes on the planet.