NASA’s intrepid Ingenuity helicopter takes a break from flying across the Martian sky.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which oversees the ongoing Mars mission, said it decided to ground Ingenuity to give the helicopter’s solar-powered batteries a break during dust storms currently swirling around him.
Seasonal dust storms greatly reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the helicopter’s solar arrays, making efficient battery charging nearly impossible.
“Dust levels are expected to decrease later in July, so the team decided to rest the helicopter’s batteries for a few weeks and restore their daily charge level,” JPL said in a post on its website. “Weather permitting, Ingenuity is expected to be back in the air around early August.”
The award-winning Ingenuity helicopter made history in April 2021 when it became the first aircraft to achieve powered, controlled flight on another planet. Since then, the drone-like device has made 28 more flights, the most recent of which took place on June 11 of this year.
Standing 19.3 inches (49 cm) tall and weighing 4 pounds (2 kg), Ingenuity’s longest single flight took it 2,326 feet (709 meters) across the surface of Mars, while the fastest it has flown , is 12.3 miles per hour (5.5 meters per second). The helicopter’s longest continuous flight time so far is 169.5 seconds.
JPL originally described Ingenuity as a demonstration mission. But the flying machine quickly exceeded expectations, prompting the team to send it on increasingly challenging flights, while also deploying it to assist the ground rover Perseverance by helping it find the most efficient routes across the red planet’s surface. It did this by taking images of the terrain from an altitude of about 33 feet (10 meters) and relaying the data to the rover team, which then used it to plan the safest and fastest routes between points of interest.
Indeed, the helicopter has performed so well that NASA appears ready to build more advanced flying machines for future missions to Mars and possibly other planets.
Hardly surprising for such an ambitious mission, the JPL team faced a number of technical challenges with Ingenuity, but thankfully always managed to overcome them—even from 115 million miles away.
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