NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter reached record highs this weekend, flying 40 feet above the planet’s surface and passing the one-mile-flown mark.
The autonomous chopper’s “most complex” voyage yet, Flight 10 saw Ingenuity reach its target of “Raised Ridges,” a location appropriately named for its geographic features, starting some 164 feet from the helicopter’s previous location.
Navigating 10 distinct waypoints, Ingenuity snapped photos from its two cameras (one color, one black-and-white) along its journey, sending data back to Earth for Perseverance scientists to reconstruct and research.
Raised Ridges is an area of particular interest to NASA, according to helicopter operations lead Teddy Tzanetos of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We will be imaging Raised Ridges because it’s an area that Perseverance scientists find intriguing and are considering visiting sometime in the future,” Tzanetos wrote in a pre-flight blog post.
Ingenuity spent only about 165 seconds in the air, traveling some 310 feet west to land at its seventh airfield. The four-pound, solar-powered rotorcraft made a similar trip earlier this month, collecting close-up images of the Séítah terrain and setting new records for distance, time aloft, and groundspeed.
“Aerial scouting aids the Perseverance Mars rover team in deciding what moves to make next,” NASA JPL wrote in a Sunday Instagram post. There is no word yet on when the aircraft will fly again.
Since its deployment on the Red Planet in April, Ingenuity has survived 107 sols (Martian days)—76 sols beyond the original technology demonstration mission for which it was designed. The helicopter has also successfully executed two separate flight-software updates, and as of Saturday, has flown more than a mile with a total time aloft of 1,007 seconds over 10 flights.
