What do you see when you fly above the surface of our neighboring planet Mars? This is shown in this video, which Mars helicopter Ingenuity made during its furthest and fastest flight to date.

Originally, the Mars helicopter Ingenuity had “one to five flights” on the schedule. The team behind the heli is now preparing the 29e flee from. Meanwhile, the space agency has a video released that Ingenuity himself made of his 25e flight, which took place on April 8, 2022. That was the longest and fastest flight to date: the explorer covered a distance of 704 meters at a speed of 5.5 meters per second for most of the route.

Accelerated five times

Ingenuity made the video with his navigation camera. As a result, you do not see the heli itself, but the shadow it casts on the surface of Mars, about 10 meters below. On that surface, ripples in the sand can first be seen. Then the heli flies over a rockier part. Then follows a fairly flat stretch: a suitable landing site for the unmanned scout.

That landing is not on the video by the way; nor take off. The reason for this: if the helicopter is closer than 1 meter above the surface, the navigation camera switches itself off. As a result, the dust thrown up during take-off and landing cannot confuse the navigation system.

Anyone who thinks it all goes very quickly: that’s right. The video actually lasted almost three minutes. Apparently NASA thought that was a bit long for the impatient YouTube-era audience, because the space agency decided to speed up the video by a factor of five.

Lost contact

At the beginning of this month it was a while exciting around the mission† Dust had landed on Ingenuity’s solar panels, preventing it from properly charging its batteries. As a result, NASA lost contact with the air reconnaissance.

Ultimately, the space agency decided to suspend the mission of the rover Perseverance, which maintains contact with the helicopter, for a day. As a result, the cart could focus purely on ‘finding’ the helicopter. That worked, so that Ingenuity can now make some more flights.

Heating adjust at -40 degrees

The only question is how many flights there will be. To keep the helicopter running, NASA has decided, among other things, to only switch on the ‘heating’ when the batteries become colder than -40 degrees. Previously this happened at -20 degrees. Whether the batteries can withstand such lower temperatures for a longer period of time remains to be seen.