Nasa’s Mars copter makes second flight

NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its left Mastcam-Z camera. Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras located high on the rover’s mast. This is one still frame from a sequence captured by the camera while taking video. This image was acquired on Apr. 22, 2021.(NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)

Nasa successfully carried out a second flight on Mars yesterday of its mini helicopter Ingenuity, a 52-second sortie that saw it climb to a height of 16’ (5m). “So far, the engineering telemetry we have received and analysed tell us that the flight met expectations,” said Bob Balaram, Ingenuity’s chief engineer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa)’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in southern California. “We have two flights of Mars under our belts, which means that there is still a lot to learn during this month of Ingenuity,” Balaram said in a statement. The US space agency conducted the first flight of the four pound (1.8kg) rotorcraft on Monday, the first powered flight ever on another planet. That time Ingenuity rose to a height of 10’ and then touched down after 39.1 seconds. For the second flight, which lasted 51.9 seconds, Ingenuity climbed to 16’, hovered briefly, tilted and then accelerated sideways for 7’. “The helicopter came to a stop, hovered in place, and made turns to point its camera in different directions,” said Havard Grip, Ingenuity’s chief pilot. “Then it headed back to the centre of the airfield to land. It sounds simple, but there are many unknowns regarding how to fly a helicopter on Mars.” Data and images from the flights are transmitted 173mn miles (278mn km) back to Earth where they are received by Nasa’s array of ground antennas and processed. Ingenuity travelled to Mars tucked under the belly of the Perseverance rover, which landed on the Red Planet on February 18 on a mission to search for signs of past microbial life. Ingenuity’s goal, by contrast, is to prove its technology works. Ingenuity’s flights are challenging because of conditions vastly different from Earth’s – foremost among them a rarefied atmosphere that has less than 1% the density of our own. This means that Ingenuity’s rotors, which span four feet, have to spin at 2,400 revolutions per minute to achieve lift – about five times more than a helicopter on Earth. Also, because of the distance from Earth, it cannot be piloted by a human.