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Only a week after setting a brand new altitude report on Mars, NASA’s spectacular Ingenuity helicopter has simply flown sooner than ever earlier than, reaching a velocity of 17.9 mph (8 meters per second) throughout its sixtieth flight. Its earlier report was 15 mph (6.5 m/s) in a flight earlier this yr.
Ingenuity additionally lined 1,116 toes (340 meters) in 133 seconds at an altitude of 53 toes (16 meters) throughout its speediest flight throughout the martian floor.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is overseeing the Ingenuity mission, shared information of the flight report on Tuesday in a publish on social media:
It’s been an incredible month for the JPL crew because it seeks to push its valiant Ingenuity helicopter to its limits. Only a week in the past, the 4-pound, 19-inch-tall helicopter set one other report when it reached an altitude of 20 meters, beating its earlier report by 6 meters.
However its mission isn’t all about setting information. The crew despatched Ingenuity to Mars with the Perseverance rover, with the pair reaching the crimson planet in February 2021. The drone-like flying machine arrived as a expertise demonstration, with the crew eager to see if such a contraption might develop into the primary to realize powered, managed flight on one other planet.
In April 2021, it did precisely that, coming into the historical past books because it rose just some meters above the dusty martian floor earlier than fastidiously returning for a delicate touchdown. That flight gave the crew confidence to push the drone a little bit additional with each subsequent flight.
It proved so adept at dealing with Mars’ super-thin ambiance that aerial imagery captured by Ingenuity has been utilized by the Perseverance crew to plan protected and environment friendly routes for the rover because it strikes between areas of curiosity in quest of proof of historical microbial life. The flying machine’s imagery from such a singular perspective might additionally show helpful for future crewed missions to the distant planet.
Nevertheless it hasn’t all been clean crusing, because the helicopter has skilled a variety of technical points alongside the best way. Encouragingly, regardless of the gap between engineers on Earth and Mars, they have been all resolved.
The success of Ingenuity means NASA is prone to construct extra superior designs for future missions to Mars and maybe different celestial our bodies far past.
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