NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter had a third outstanding test flight on Mars—it lifted off at about 4:31 a.m. EDT (12:33 pm local Mars time), rising 16 feet (5 meters) – the same altitude as its second flight—but then, it really took off! Then it zipped downrange 164 feet (50 meters), just over half the length of a football field, reaching a top speed of 6.6 feet per second (2 meters per second). Its flight lasted about 80 seconds.
As data from Mars started streaming in at around 10:15 a.m. EDT, the mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California was ecstatic, anticipating that the data would not only facilitate additional Ingenuity flights, but possibly inform new designs for rotorcraft on Mars in the future.
To say this involves fine tuning and precise execution of complicated commands is an understatement.
The helicopter’s black-and-white navigation camera tracks surface features below, and the images are processed onboard; its flight computer autonomously flies the craft based on instructions sent up hours before data are received back on Earth—radio instructions to Mars can take anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes, depending on the relative position of the two planets. As Ingenuity flies greater distances, more images are taken, and if it goes too fast, the flight algorithm can’t track surface features. Additionally, the camera needs to track images clearly; dust can obscure the images and interfere with its performance, and the software must perform all of this consistently and flawlessly.
