NASA’s Perseverance rover just got another look at its pioneering robotic cousin.
the size of a car Perseverance recently took a picture of the Ingenuity helicopter as the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) helicopter sat atop a Red Planet sand dune.
“The #MarsHelicopter and I are closer together than we’ve been in a long time, and guess who I saw lounging on a dune between flights. Can you believe Ingenuity is gearing up for flight #39?” the perseverance team said via Twitter (opens in a new tab) on Wednesday (January 11), in a post that featured a photo of the small helicopter.
Related: Fly over the tracks of the Mars rover with the Ingenuity helicopter (video)
Wits and Perseverance landed together inside MarsJezero Crater in February 2021. The 45-kilometer (28-mile) wide Jezero was home to a large lake and river delta long ago, and Perseverance is scouring the area for signs of antiquity. life on mars.
The six-wheeled robot is also collecting and caching dozens of samples for its future return to Earth. Over the past few weeks, Perseverance has been cache some of your sample tubes in a “repository” in a piece of the Jezero flat that the mission team calls Three Forks.
Perseverance has deposited so far six of the 10 planned sample tubes (opens in a new tab) at the Three Forks depot, which serves as a backup in case the rover is not healthy enough to transport material to a future NASA lander later this decade. A rocket aboard that lander will launch the samples into Mars orbit, where they will be picked up by a European spacecraft and transported back to Earth. Samples could land here. already in 2033.
Deposit samples are doubled; Perseverance is keeping a set of drilled material from the same target rocks on your body. If necessary, two Ingenuity-type helicopters to be launched with the future lander will fly up to Three Forks and take the sample tubes one by one.
Ingenuity is currently serving as a scout for Perseverance, helping the rover team choose the best routes through Jezero’s rugged landscape and identify promising outcrops for in-depth study.
This work is part of the helicopter’s extended mission. Not long after landing, Ingenuity surpassed its first five-flight campaign, proving that powered flight is possible on the thin martian atmosphere.
Ingenuity made its 39th Mars flight on Wednesday, covering 459 feet (140 meters) of ground over the course of nearly 79 seconds. To date, the helicopter has flown a total of 25,690 feet (7,830 m) on Mars and stayed airborne for more than 64 minutes, according to the mission flight log (opens in a new tab).
Perseverance has captured Ingenuity footage before. The rover took photos of the helicopter just after it was deployed on the Jezero flat, for example, and also Recorded video of Ingenuity Flight 13which took place in September 2021.
Mike Wall is the author of “out there (opens in a new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; Illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @migueldwall (opens in a new tab). follow us On twitter @Espaciodotcom (opens in a new tab) and in Facebook (opens in a new tab).
