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The Mars helicopter Ingenuity is gearing up for its fifteenth flight this weekend, starting a journey that may take it again to its touchdown location and reunite it with its rover buddy Perseverance.
The flight scheduled for right this moment, Saturday, November 6, will take Ingenuity again within the course of the Wright Brothers Area the place it took its first flights, by the Octavia E. Butler touchdown website. The helicopter staff stories that they anticipate it is going to take between 4 and 7 flights for the helicopter to return to its authentic touchdown website. Ingenuity will rejoin Perseverance on the Séítah area earlier than heading off to discover the Jezero river delta.
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter acquired this picture utilizing its navigation digital camera. This digital camera is mounted within the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed instantly downward to trace the bottom throughout flight. This picture was acquired on Oct. 24, 2021 (Sol 241 of the Perseverance rover mission) on the native imply photo voltaic time of 12:34:15. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Since its deployment, Ingenuity has spent 25 minutes within the air and traveled a complete of 2883 meters over its 14 flights. Ingenuity’s earlier flight, quantity 14, was its first profitable flight at the next rotor pace of two,700 RPM. This larger rotor pace is important to counteract seasonal modifications on Mars that are inflicting the already low atmospheric density to drop even decrease. These larger rotor speeds are dangerous as a result of they hadn’t been tried within the earlier testing on Earth, however with the profitable flight on October 24, it seems like Ingenuity will be capable of proceed its exploration of Mars from the air.
The plan is now laid out for the helicopter’s subsequent steps, as described by Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity Workforce Lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory: “Flight #15 will return Ingenuity again to the Raised Ridges area, imaged in Flight #10. On this flight the helicopter will traverse 1,332 toes (406 meters) throughout 130 seconds of flight, touring at 11.1 mph (5 meters per second) groundspeed. We’ll seize coloration return-to-earth (RTE) excessive decision (13MP) photos, one post-takeoff pointed to the SW, and 9 pointed towards the NW alongside the flight path. Nominal altitude for the flight is predicted to be 39.3 toes (12 meters) above floor degree.”
The staff can also be contemplating whether or not to replace Ingenuity’s flight software program within the close to future, in an effort to give the helicopter much more subtle navigation capabilities.
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