NASA’s Helicopter on Mars Just Keeps Flying and Flying
TheMightyChickadee writes:
NASA's helicopter on Mars just keeps flying and flying:
On Monday, NASA's Ingenuity helicopter made its ninth and most ambitious flight yet.
This time, the space agency said, the tiny flier took to the skies for 166.4 seconds and reached a maximum speed of 5 m/s. This is equivalent to 10 mph, or a brisk run. During this flight, Ingenuity covered about 625 meters.
A little more than two months have passed since Ingenuity's first flight, on April 19 of this year. During that initial test, the helicopter hovered to about 3 meters above the ground before landing again. Since then, the engineering team behind the helicopter has pushed the vehicle higher, farther, and faster across the surface of Mars.
In flying farther and farther, Ingenuity is showing off some of the benefits of using powered flight to explore other worlds. The distance Ingenuity traveled during this single flight, NASA engineer Keri Bean noted, is about the same distance that the NASA's Spirit rover traveled during the entirety of its prime mission on the red planet.
And, making itself useful!
For Monday's flight, NASA flew from the Perseverance rover and took a shortcut to reconnoiter the Seitah region, which interests scientists but is likely impassable to the rover due to its sandy ripples.
Wikipedia's list of Ingenuity's flights and map of Perseverance and Ingenuity paths.
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