NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter continues to raise the bar for Red Planet flights.
The 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) Ingenuity hovered 46 feet (14 meters) above the red dirt of Mars on Saturday (Dec. 3), setting a new altitude record on its 35th flight beyond Earth.
The small helicopter’s previous record was 39 feet (12 m), set on three previous Mars flights. (You can get an overview of all 35 Ingenuity flights in the mission’s flight log (opens in new tab) .)
Related: Fly over Mars rover trails with Ingenuity helicopter (video)
Ingenuity landed on NASA’s Perseverance rover on the floor of Jezero Crater in February 2021. The helicopter soon deployed from the rover’s belly and embarked on a campaign to show that powered flight is possible in the thin Martian atmosphere.
That first technology demonstration phase lasted less than a month and consisted of just five missions. But NASA soon granted Ingenuity a mission extension, keeping the rotorcraft flying. Current objectives focus on pushing the boundaries of Red Planet flight and conducting reconnaissance for Perseverance.
The rover is looking for signs of ancient Martian life at the bottom of the 45-kilometer-wide Jezero, which billions of years ago was home to a lake and a river delta. Perseverance also collects and caches a series of monsters, which a joint NASA and European Space Agency campaign will send back to Earth, perhaps as early as 2033.
Saturday’s flight was Ingenuity’s first since November 22 and only the second since a major software update. That update, which took several weeks to install, “gives Ingenuity two major new capabilities: avoiding hazards when landing and using digital elevation maps to help navigate,” mission team members wrote in a blog post late last month. (opens in new tab) .
Ingenuity covered about 50 feet of horizontal distance in Saturday’s flight, which lasted 52 seconds. The helicopter has now traveled a total of 24,302 feet (7,407 m) and remained aloft for 59.9 minutes during its 35 Mars flights, according to the mission’s flight log.
Mike Wall is the author of “ Outside (opens in new tab) (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab) . follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) and further Facebook (opens in new tab) .
