NASA's resourceful Mars helicopter aims for another flight milestone

Photo Credit: The New York Times The courageous NASA Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, is preparing to take off on its 49th mission to the planet. In February 2021, the Perseverance rover and the tiny drone-like aircraft touched down on Mars. Ingenuity has been helping the rover by using its onboard camera to explore the best paths for Perseverance to take across the rocky surface. The rover's main objective is to look for signs of ancient life on the faraway planet. Yet when the journey to Mars began more than two years ago, the team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is in charge of the current expedition, was only concerned with testing whether the helicopter would be able to take to the air in Mars' thin atmosphere. After successfully completing its debut flight in April 2021 to become the first aircraft to fly on another planet, the team dispatched Ingenuity on a series of progressively difficult journeys, which culminated in the missions to help the rover. Photo Credit: Smithsonian Magazine Despite its remarkable achievements, the Ingenuity team is still eager to test the aircraft's capabilities, and a flight this week might take it to its greatest altitude yet. Ingenuity could soar as high as 52.5 feet (16 meters), breaking the previous record of 46 feet (14 meters) set on December 3, 2022, according to a tweet from JPL. The 1.6-foot-tall (0.49-meter) helicopter is anticipated to fly for around 135 seconds at a speed of about 10 mph, covering a distance of 894 feet (272.5 meters). Also Read: NASA Creates a Novel Quantum Detector that May Change the Way Quantum Computers Work in the Future The distance traveled by Ingenuity in a single flight is 2,325 feet (708.9 meters), which was accomplished in April 2022. The current record for time spent in the air is 169.5 seconds, set during a flight in August 2021. NASA is intending to develop a more sophisticated version of the aircraft for upcoming missions to Mars and maybe other planets since it has been so impressed with Ingenuity's capacity to endure this long while also overcoming a number of technical challenges. The vehicle would be used by NASA to support rovers on the ground and collect aerial visual data for mapping purposes. It may also be used to transfer soil and rock samples to waiting spacecraft that would return them to Earth for closer examination by researchers eager to learn more about the genesis of our solar system and the history of a planet.