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NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter acquired this image using its high-resolution color camera on its 66th Red Planet flight, which occurred on Nov. 3, 2023.
(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is poised to set yet another record this weekend.
The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity, the first robot ever to explore the skies of a world beyond Earth, is scheduled to make its 68th Red Planet flight on Saturday (Dec. 9).
The plan calls for Ingenuity to cover 2,717 feet (828 meters) of Mars ground — more than half a mile — during the sortie, mission team members wrote in a preview today (Dec. 8). That’s considerably farther than the helicopter’s current distance record of 2,310 feet (704 m), which was set in April 2022, on its 25th flight.
Related: Mars helicopter Ingenuity phones home, breaking 63-day silence
Ingenuity landed on the floor of Mars’ Jezero Crater with NASA’s Perseverance rover in February 2021, tasked with showing that aerial exploration is possible on Mars despite the planet’s thin atmosphere.
The little rotorcraft did just that over the course of five flights during the spring of 2021, then was granted an extended mission that continues to this day. Ingenuity is now serving as a scout for Perseverance, which is hunting for signs of ancient Mars life and collecting samples for future return to Earth.
Saturday’s planned flight will target a top speed of 22.4 mph (36 kph), mission team members wrote in the preview. That would tie Ingenuity’s velocity record, which was set this past October. The coming hop will last 147 seconds and take the chopper a maximum of 33 feet (10 m) above Mars’ red dirt.
Those latter two figures won’t set any new marks; Ingenuity has soared as high as 79 feet (24 m) and stayed aloft for 169.5 seconds at a time, according to the mission’s flight log.
Over the course of its 67 Mars flights, Ingenuity has racked up a total of 121 minutes of air time and covered about 9.5 miles (15.3 kilometers) of ground.
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Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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