NASA’s history-making Mars helicopter Ingenuity
The Ingenuity team is targeting early Sunday morning (April 25) for sortie number three. The flight plan calls for Ingenuity to get about 16.5 feet (5 meters) above the floor of Mars’ Jezero Crater, travel a total of 330 feet (100 m) and stay aloft for 80 seconds, chief pilot Håvard Grip of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote in a blog post today
Grip did not give an estimated liftoff time but did say that data and photos are expected to starting coming down to Earth around 10:16 a.m. EDT (1416 GMT) on Sunday.
Video: Zoom in on Ingenuity helicopter’s 1st flight on Mars
Ingenuity’s first two flights were not so involved. On its groundbreaking first flight remained airborne for nearly 52 seconds
During that second flight, Ingenuity snapped a photo of Jezero’s floor and the tracks made by its much larger partner, NASA’s Perseverance rover
Ingenuity is a technology demonstration designed to show that aerial vehicles can operate on Mars. A successful flight campaign could open the Red Planet’s skies to extensive exploration, NASA officials have said.
The helicopter landed with Perseverance on Feb. 18 and deployed from the rover on April 3 to prep for its month-long flight campaign, which ends in early May. The Ingenuity team aims to make a total of five flights during that span, with each one more ambitious than the last.
Mike Wall is the author of “ Out There ” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
