On April 8, the Ingenuity drone helicopter located on Mars successfully completed its 25th flight. During the anniversary flight, the rotorcraft broke several of its records at once.
#MarsHelicopter is breaking records again!
Ingenuity completed its 25th and most ambitious flight. It broke its distance and ground speed records, traveling 704 meters at 5.5 meters per second while flying for 161.3 seconds. https://go.nasa.gov/2U43zuH pic.twitter.com/BQkwDNzTsY— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 12, 2022
The 25th flight was a new link in the chain of recent movements of Ingenuity. Their target is a region located at the base of an ancient river delta. It will become a new drone base. From there, Ingenuity will make flights to aerial reconnaissance of this area for the Perseverance rover.
The recent flight of Ingenuity was marked not only by a beautiful figure, but also by a couple of new records. In total, the drone covered a distance of 704 m, reaching a maximum speed of 5.5 m/s. The flight lasted 161.3 seconds.
Such a long route length is explained by the fact that the specialists of the mission support group decided to avoid the Ingenuity flight over the area where the equipment dropped during the Perseverance landing is located. We are talking about a heat shield, a parachute and a “sky crane” system, which could interfere with the operation of the drone’s laser altimeter and complicate the operation of its visual navigation system.
It should be noted that the 25th flight also marked the overcoming of the Ingenuity section of the Martian surface with difficult terrain, where specialists had to carefully choose the landing site of the device. Now the drone has “escaped” to the operational expanse, and in front of it lies relatively flat terrain with numerous places for landing sites.
Recall that recently the MRO device saw Ingenuity on the surface of Mars.
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