Nasa Mars helicopter: Ingenuity makes longest flight yet

With two tests already successfully completed, Nasa’s pioneering Mars helicopter Ingenuity has now made its longest and fastest flight on the Red Planet yet, covering 50m and reaching a top speed of 2 metres per second.

According to the US space agency, the distance covered by the rotorcraft is beyond what it had accomplished during its testing phases on Earth at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The successful flight took place at 4:31 AM EDT with Ingenuity rising 5m – the same altitude as its previous demo, and the 1.8kg craft then came back to its take-off spot in a total flight time of 80 seconds.

“Today’s flight was what we planned for, and yet it was nothing short of amazing,” Dave Lavery, the project’s program executive at Nasa’s headquarters in Washington, said in a statement.

“With this flight, we are demonstrating critical capabilities that will enable the addition of an aerial dimension to future Mars missions.”

The space agency noted that the Mastcam-Z imager aboard Nasa’s Perseverance Mars rover had captured video of the feat, and in the coming days the rover, which is also the communications base, is slated to send the recording back to Earth.

While successful automated flight is one hurdle Ingenuity faces every time it takes off, capturing images of the ground and processing them during its flight is another challenge for the helicopter to overcome, Nasa noted.

Since the onboard computer and the chopper’s cameras utilise the same resources, the space agency said long distance flight involving more photographs may hinder the computer’s ability to process features of the Martian surface – and the faster the helicopter moves, the more this will be tested.

“That posed a challenge: Would the camera track the ground as designed while moving at higher speed on the Red Planet?,” JPL scientists noted in a statement.

According to the space agency, Ingenuity could not be tested for these parameters on Earth.

Much of Ingenuity’s testing on Earth was done in a chamber that was evacuated to near vacuum, and back-filled with carbon dioxide gas to a density representative of the Red Planet’s atmosphere.

Due to space constraints within this chamber, Nasa said the craft could not move more than 1.6m in any direction during its testing phases at JPL.

“This is the first time we’ve seen the algorithm for the camera running over a long distance. You can’t do this inside a test chamber,” added MiMi Aung, project manager at JPL.

And everytime the chopper attempts to take flight on Mars, it also has to spin its blades at speeds close to 2500rpm to achieve lift off in the Red Planet’s thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, which is approximately 1 per cent of the Earth’s atmosphere density – equivalent to the air density on Earth at an altitude of 35km.

Nasa scientists added that they are also cautious of Martian dust as it can obscure the images taken by the helicopter and interfere with the flight camera’s performance.

“When you’re in the test chamber, you have an emergency land button right there and all these safety features. We have done all we can to prepare Ingenuity to fly free without these features,” said Gerik Kubiak, a JPL software engineer.

So far, the helicopter has made three successful flights on the Red Planet, and Nasa is gearing up for a fourth in the coming days.

With each test, the Ingenuity team has been pushing the chopper’s limits, adding instructions to capture more photos of its own – including from the colour camera, which captured its first images during its second flight.

Nasa believes these additional steps can provide insights that could be used by future aerial missions.