Ingenuity Mars Helicopter on Friday (Apr. 8) completed its 25th flight on Mars, setting new personal bests for speed and distance.
According to Ingenuity's flight log, the helicopter covered the greatest distance of 2,051 feet during a flight in July 2021. It had already set a speed record of 5 meters per second on many flights.
"#MarsHelicopter is breaking records again! Ingenuity completed its 25th and most ambitious flight. It broke its distance and ground speed records, traveling 704 meters [2,310 feet] at 5.5 meters per second while flying for 161.3 seconds," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which manages Ingenuity's mission, tweeted on Tuesday (Apr. 12).
However, Friday's flight did not set a new duration record; that honor belongs to a trip in August 2021 that lasted 169.5 seconds.
In February 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover landed on the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater in search of life and samples. In April of that year, the tiny chopper launched from the rover's belly on a five-flight, one-month mission to demonstrate that aerial exploration on Mars is viable despite the planet's thin atmosphere.
Based on data collected by spacecraft such as NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Jezero Crater was selected as a suitable location for this operation. Orbital imagery revealed a fan-shaped feature in Jezero that mission team members identified as a delta - a location where a river drained into a lake about 3.7 billion years ago, depositing sediments that could include evidence of ancient Martian bacteria, if any existed at the time.
That original campaign was rapidly overtaken by ingenuity. It's now on an extended mission, testing the limits of Martian flight and gathering intelligence for Perseverance, which is making its way to an accessible relic of the ancient river delta that originally existed within Jezero.
Ingenuity's trip on Friday was its second in five days and its fifth in the last month. Such action is unsurprising; Perseverance has been making substantial progress toward the delta, and Ingenuity must keep up.
In reality, the mission team prefers that the helicopter arrive first at the delta.
"This is for two reasons: telecommunications and safety," Ben Morrell, Ingenuity operations engineer at JPL, wrote in a blog post on Apr. 5.
"Ingenuity only communicates with the helicopter base station on Perseverance, so it needs to stay close enough to have a good connection," he added. "For safety, it is ideal if Ingenuity flies ahead of Perseverance to avoid ever having to fly past or near the rover, to minimize the risk of any close contact in a worst-case scenario."
