Last week, on its 33rd extraterrestrial sortie, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars chopper took to the skies once more and hovered there for almost a minute.
Ingenuity, which is a part of NASA’s life-seeking Perseverance rover mission, took to the skies of Mars on Saturday (Sept. 24), achieving a flight of just over 55 seconds. According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which oversees the missions of both Ingenuity and Perseverance, the 4-pound (1.8-kg) rotorcraft travelled around 365 feet (111 metres) before landing in a new place.
JPL officials tweeted on Tuesday (opens in new tab) that you can see Ingenuity’s leg and little shadow if you look attentively at the photograph (Sept. 27).
Perseverance is using ingenuity to investigate Jezero Crater, which once held a lake and a river delta. NASA and the European Space Agency are collaborating to conduct a sample-return mission to the area later in the 2020s. This mission will employ helicopters similar to Ingenuity to collect samples collected by Perseverance and transport them to a rocket for a launch back to Earth.
The sample-return mission and Perseverance’s collection of samples have been cast by the crew as essential to learning more about Mars’ past and the possibility of life there.
