NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter continues smashing its goals. The chopper on Sunday flew faster and farther than ever before, setting a new record distance of 164 feet (just over half the length of a football field) and top speed of 6.6 feet per second.
But what happens on Mars doesn’t stay on Mars. The Perseverance rover captured Ingenuity’s third flight on camera; watch below as the helicopter lifts into the air, zips out of shot, and returns moments later to land again.
“Today’s flight was what we planned for, and yet it was nothing short of amazing,” Dave Lavery, the project’s program executive for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter said on Sunday. “With this flight, we are demonstrating critical capabilities that will enable the addition of an aerial dimension to future Mars missions.”
Additional segments, captured by the Mastcam-Z imager aboard Perseverance, will be sent back to Earth in the coming days, providing NASA with a more complete vision of the helicopter’s 80-second journey across its flight zone.
Ingenuity’s black-and-white navigation camera, meanwhile, tracks surface features, snapping photos as it moves. “This is the first time we’ve seen the algorithm for the camera running over a long distance,” according to MiMi Aung, the helicopter’s project manager at JPL. “You can’t do this inside a test chamber.”
In the lab, scientists can do their best to simulate the thin Martian atmosphere, but there’s not enough room for even a tiny whirlybird to move more than about 1.6 feet in any direction—leaving the team wondering whether the camera would work when flying at higher speeds on the Red Planet.
The stars basically have to align for the camera to work, Gerik Kubiak, a JPL software engineer, explained, lamenting the potential for dust to obscure images and interfere with the camera, or the software to malfunction. “When you’re in the test chamber, you have an emergency land button right there and all these safety features,” he said. “We have done all we can to prepare Ingenuity to fly free without these features.”
With a successful third flight in the books, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter team is currently preparing for its fourth launch in a “few days’ time.”
