Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Ingenuity helicopter explores Mars on its own for the first time

Georgina Torbet
By
NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter's fifth flight was captured on May 7, 2021, by one of the navigation cameras aboard the agency's Perseverance rover. This was the first time it flew to a new landing site.
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s fifth flight was captured on May 7, 2021, by one of the navigation cameras aboard the agency’s Perseverance rover. This was the first time it flew to a new landing site. NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has made another successful flight, this time traveling away from the location which has been its home base and exploring a new area of the red planet.

At 3:26 p.m. ET (12:26 p.m. PT) on Friday, May 7, the helicopter completed a one-way journey from its previous home base, named Wright Brothers Field, to a new airfield located 423 feet away to the south.

Recommended Videos

“We bid adieu to our first Martian home, Wright Brothers Field, with grateful thanks for the support it provided to the historic first flights of a planetary rotorcraft,” said Bob Balaram, chief engineer for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at JPL, in a statement. “No matter where we go from here, we will always carry with us a reminder of how much those two bicycle builders from Dayton meant to us during our pursuit of the first flight on another world.”

Over a flight lasting 108 seconds, Ingenuity traveled to its new area and then flew upwards to its highest altitude yet of 33 feet. From this altitude, it was able to capture high-resolution color images of the area below. This kind of capability could be invaluable for future rover missions, with helicopters able to act as scouts and to identify safe driving paths or targets of interest.

“The fifth flight of the Mars Helicopter is another great achievement for the agency,” said Bob Pearce, associate administrator for NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate. “The continuing success of Ingenuity proves the value of bringing together the strengths of diverse skill sets from across the agency to create the future, like flying an aircraft on another planet!”

Now Ingenuity is settled into its new airfield, it will continue to be in contact with the Perseverance rover. Perseverance will also be traveling south, and so the two will be able to stay in contact for a while longer.

“The plan forward is to fly Ingenuity in a manner that does not reduce the pace of Perseverance science operations,” said Balaram. “We may get a couple more flights in over the next few weeks, and then the agency will evaluate how we’re doing. We have already been able to gather all the flight performance data that we originally came here to collect. Now, this new operations demo gives us an opportunity to further expand our knowledge of flying machines on other planets.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Ingenuity and Perseverance snap photos of each other on Mars
The Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars, in an image taken by the Perseverance rover. Ingenuity recently made its 50th flight.

Everyone's favorite Mars double act, the Ingenuity helicopter and the Perseverance rover, have been traveling together recently after spending several months apart. As they explore the site of an ancient river delta in the Jezero crater, the pair have snapped images of each other that were recently shared by NASA.

The Perseverance's cameras caught this great shot of Ingenuity, which, as noted in the rover's Twitter post, is now considerably dustier than it was when it first deployed from under the rover's belly two years ago. In its two years on the red planet, Ingenuity has made more than 50 flights, which is incredible when you consider that it was designed to perform just five flights. During that time, Ingenuity had to take a break from long flights to deal with the cold martian winter, but since the beginning of the year, the helicopter has been back, making some of its longest flights yet.

Read more
Supermassive black hole spews out jet of matter in first-of-its-kind image
Scientists observing the compact radio core of M87 have discovered new details about the galaxy’s supermassive black hole. In this artist’s conception, the black hole’s massive jet is seen rising up from the centre of the black hole. The observations on which this illustration is based represent the first time that the jet and the black hole shadow have been imaged together, giving scientists new insights into how black holes can launch these powerful jets.

As well as pulling in anything which comes to close to them, black holes can occasionally expel matter at very high speeds. When clouds of dust and gas approach the event horizon of a black hole, some of it will fall inward, but some can be redirected outward in highly energetic bursts, resulting in dramatic jets of matter that shoot out at speeds approaching the speed of light. The jets can spread for thousands of light-years, with one jet emerging from each of the black hole's poles in a phenomenon thought to be related to the black hole's spin.

Scientists observing the compact radio core of M87 have discovered new details about the galaxy’s supermassive black hole. In this artist’s conception, the black hole’s massive jet of matter is seen rising up from the center of the black hole. The observations on which this illustration is based represent the first time that the jet and the black hole shadow have been imaged together, giving scientists new insights into how black holes can launch these powerful jets. S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

Read more
NASA’s InSight lander looks into Mars to study the planet’s core
This artist’s concept shows a cutaway of Mars, along with the paths of seismic waves from two separate quakes in 2021. Detected by NASA’s InSight mission, these seismic waves were the first ever identified to enter another planet’s core.

NASA's Mars InSight lander may have come to the end of its mission last year, but data from the lander is still being used to contribute to science. Data that the lander collected on marsquakes, seismic events that are similar to earthquakes, has been used to get the best look yet at Mars's core.

The lander was armed with a highly sensitive seismometer instrument that could detect seismic waves as they moved through the martian interior. By looking at the way in which these waves bounced off boundaries and moved at different speeds through different materials, scientists can work out what the inside of a planet is composed of. The latest findings show that the martian core is around 2,220 miles across, which is smaller than previously thought. The core is also denser than previously believed The results also showed that around one-fifth of the core, which is made up of liquid iron alloy, is composed of sulfur, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen.

Read more