Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Ingenuity helicopter explores Mars on its own for the first time

By
NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter's fifth flight was captured on May 7, 2021, by one of the navigation cameras aboard the agency's Perseverance rover. This was the first time it flew to a new landing site.
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s fifth flight was captured on May 7, 2021, by one of the navigation cameras aboard the agency’s Perseverance rover. This was the first time it flew to a new landing site. NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has made another successful flight, this time traveling away from the location which has been its home base and exploring a new area of the red planet.

At 3:26 p.m. ET (12:26 p.m. PT) on Friday, May 7, the helicopter completed a one-way journey from its previous home base, named Wright Brothers Field, to a new airfield located 423 feet away to the south.

Recommended Videos

“We bid adieu to our first Martian home, Wright Brothers Field, with grateful thanks for the support it provided to the historic first flights of a planetary rotorcraft,” said Bob Balaram, chief engineer for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at JPL, in a statement. “No matter where we go from here, we will always carry with us a reminder of how much those two bicycle builders from Dayton meant to us during our pursuit of the first flight on another world.”

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Over a flight lasting 108 seconds, Ingenuity traveled to its new area and then flew upwards to its highest altitude yet of 33 feet. From this altitude, it was able to capture high-resolution color images of the area below. This kind of capability could be invaluable for future rover missions, with helicopters able to act as scouts and to identify safe driving paths or targets of interest.

Related

“The fifth flight of the Mars Helicopter is another great achievement for the agency,” said Bob Pearce, associate administrator for NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate. “The continuing success of Ingenuity proves the value of bringing together the strengths of diverse skill sets from across the agency to create the future, like flying an aircraft on another planet!”

Now Ingenuity is settled into its new airfield, it will continue to be in contact with the Perseverance rover. Perseverance will also be traveling south, and so the two will be able to stay in contact for a while longer.

“The plan forward is to fly Ingenuity in a manner that does not reduce the pace of Perseverance science operations,” said Balaram. “We may get a couple more flights in over the next few weeks, and then the agency will evaluate how we’re doing. We have already been able to gather all the flight performance data that we originally came here to collect. Now, this new operations demo gives us an opportunity to further expand our knowledge of flying machines on other planets.”

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
NASA fires up its X-59 quiet supersonic jet engine for the first time
NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft sits in its run stall at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California, in this image from Oct. 30, 2024.

Why don't we have supersonic aircraft any more? Although commercial supersonic air travel kicked off in the 1960s with the arrival of the Concorde, since that jet was retired in 2003, there are no supersonic jets in common civilian usage any more. Part of that is because the Concorde was expensive and difficult to maintain, and the increase in speed wasn't worth the huge bump in money and effort it took to keep it flying. But another part of it is something that seems to be endemic to faster-than-sound travel: the sonic boom.

When an object accelerates to faster than the speed of sound, it creates shockwaves that cause a sonic boom. This is noisy enough to wake people sleeping beneath an aircraft's flight path, and can even damage buildings or other structures on the ground. So, understandably, supersonic flights are forbidden across the U.S.

Read more
After a long break, NASA suggests timing for next spacewalk
NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps (center) assists NASA astronauts Mike Barratt (left) and Tracy C. Dyson inside the Quest airlock.

NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps (center) assists NASA astronauts Mike Barratt (left) and Tracy Dyson inside the station's Quest airlock on the day of an incident involving Dyson's incident. NASA TV

If you look at the list of spacewalks that have taken place at the International Space Station (ISS), you’ll notice that only two have taken place in 2024, with the last one happening in June.

Read more
See the polar moon sites where NASA plans to land its astronauts
An artist’s concept of an Artemis astronaut deploying an instrument on the lunar surface.

NASA has updated its list of potential landing sites for the next human visit to the moon, which is planned for 2026. The Artemis III mission will see the first crewed lunar landing since the Apollo era, and the plan is for astronauts to explore the moon's South Pole region where there is thought to be water ice on the lunar surface.

NASA shared a list of 13 candidate landing locations for Artemis III in 2022, but has now updated its list to nine candidates. Some of these were on the list previously, while others have been added such as the Mons Mouton mountain and plateau, which is particularly interesting to scientists because the height of the mountain means that there are permanently shadowed regions nearby. These places, where sunlight never touches, are particularly good candidates when it comes to looking for water ice.

Read more