Ingenuity: the small drone-helicopter has carried out 40 flight missions on the planet Mars!
Landed on the planet Mars in 2021, the small drone-helicopter Ingenuity since serves as a scout for the rover Perseverance. Initially, NASA had designed Ingenuity for a handful of missions, but the drone ultimately proved to be much more reliable than expected, to the point of relentlessly lining up flights on the surface of Mars. Thursday, January 19, Ingenuity thus carried out its fortieth reconnaissance flight mission, a symbolic “score” which clearly illustrates the resilience of the small device (the climate of Mars is not easy). 40 missions is also eight times more than what the American space agency had planned, and this corresponds to a total distance traveled of more than 8 km (almost as much as Perseverance)!
Photo taken by Ingenuity’s navigation camera during the 40th Mars surface flight
This 40th flight of 1 minute and 30 seconds enabled Ingenuity to cover a distance of 178 meters in one go. The small drone-helicopter now points to the region of Mars called Airfield Beta, an area of Mars of no particular scientific interest but which will allow Ingenuity to recharge its batteries without risk. Apart from a faulty sensor, Ingenuity is in perfect working order, which means that it should celebrate its fiftieth Mars mission in a few weeks (months?).
The reliability of Ingenuity impresses NASA so much that the agency’s engineers modified the mission to recover the Martian samples gleaned by the Perseverance/Ingenuity duo. Initially, it was planned that these samples would be recovered using the SFR rover (Sample Fetch Rover), but now this task will be allocated to an amrada of small drones of the same type from Ingenuity.
