Fourth Flight Completed After False Start The Day Before

MiMi Aung, Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Project Manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is a happy camper.

After software issues prevented a fourth flight attempt on Thursday, Friday's efforts went considerably better.

Aung notes that, "Ingenuity successfully completed its fourth flight today, and we couldn’t be happier. The helicopter took off at 1049 EDT, climbing to an altitude of 16 feet before flying south approximately 436 feet and then back, for an 872-foot round trip. In total, we were in the air for 117 seconds. That’s another set of records for the helicopter, even compared to the spectacular third flight.

We also managed to capture lots of images during the flight with the color camera and with Ingenuity’s black-and-white navigation camera, which tracks surface features as it flies. Images from that navigation camera are typically used by Ingenuity’s flight controller and then thrown away unless we specifically tell the helicopter to store them for later use. During this flight, we saved even more images than we did on our previous flights: about 60 total during the last 164 feet before the helicopter returned to its landing site."

Aung added, "Capturing images like that provides a technical challenge – another way to test Ingenuity – and provides an aerial perspective of Mars that humanity has never seen before. We’ll use these images to study the surface features of the terrain. Some of our black-and-white images were taken as stereo pairs, allowing us to test our ability to make 3D imagery of the surface and study the elevation of different sites below us. Adding this dimension to future missions could offer a broad range of scouting possibilities across regions that rovers can’t roam, close-ups that orbiters can’t provide, or ways to extend the reach of future human explorers.

But in the immediate future, we have lots of data to analyze. Ingenuity’s performance on Mars has been letter-perfect. This is an amazing time for our entire team!"

From here, the Ingenuity flight program starts getting really aggressive -- to the point where the JPL managers fully expect to eventually fly it well beyond its abilities and to its potential destruction. More news to follow. 

FMI: https://mars.nasa.gov/