Ingenuity during its 20th flight on Mars on Feb. 25, 2022.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
We’ve now flown on the Red Planet 20 times over.
Soaring above the surface of Jezero Crater, the plucky Ingenuity drone helicopter touched down safely after a midair journey lasting more than two minutes.
It’s a milestone for the Perseverance rover mission as the two vehicles continue to work together on flight operations, practicing for future missions that may ask a drone to scout ahead for interesting science to pursue.
“The #MarsHelicopter covered 391 meters [1,283 feet] at a speed of 4.4 meters per second [9.8 mph], bringing it closer to @NASAPersevere’s landing location,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California said on Twitter on Saturday (Feb. 26).
The flight shows just how far we have come in less than a year, when Ingenuity took the first-ever flying hop on Mars to demonstrate that flight was feasible in such a thin atmosphere. While engineers were fairly confident the atmosphere could support a light drone (based on flight tests on Earth in a wind tunnel), wind gusts and different gravity on Mars added some operational uncertainty about how the drone would perform.
We know now the design worked incredibly well. Ingenuity has far exceeded its initial flight plan and is now on an extended mission to assess the practicality of drones in the future. Together, it and the Perseverance rover are exploring a potentially life-friendly region that included a lake and a river delta that flowed billions of years ago.
“The delta in Jezero Crater is the reason we chose the landing site, and we hope to get to it later this spring,” Perseverance science team member Briony Horgan, an associate professor of planetary science at Purdue University, said in a recent video about the mission’s aims.
Perseverance is on a long-term mission to pick up potential samples with signs of ancient life in them, and to cache these samples upon the surface for a future mission to round up. If all goes to plan with funding and technical matters, NASA and the European Space Agency hope to have the samples back on Earth safely in the 2030s for examination in high-powered laboratories, with more advanced equipment than can be easily shipped to Mars, to assess the material.
