50 sorties
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NASA's incredible Mars helicopter has now flown 50 times on the Red Planet.
Originally rated for just five Martian sorties, Ingenuity notched its 50th on Thursday (April 13), acing a 146-second flight (opens in new tab) that took it 59 feet (18 meters) above the Red Planet's surface — higher than it's ever gone before.
The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) drone continues its epic journey on Mars, serving as a scout for NASA's Perseverance rover mission and testing key tech that could help return samples from the Red Planet in the coming years as part of the ongoing search for life on Mars.
"She has blown out of the water any sort of metric of success," Theodore Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, told Space.com last month.
"It's not just a statement of our reliability design, but it's also a statement about the technicians that can assemble this thing, right?" he said. Tzanetos added that the Ingenuity team "has really done miraculous work" that will help in getting two sample return helicopters flying on Mars a few short years from now.
Ingenuity hovered 10 feet (3 m) off the ground during a 40-second flight, a milestone hailed by then-NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen as "a true extraterrestrial Wright Brothers moment."
Getting Ingenuity off the ground was a milestone in itself, as the Martian atmosphere is quite thin and nobody can directly stick-shift the helicopter from Earth; the time delay between communications and receipt is too long for real-time control. But the flight plan uploaded to Ingenuity went well, and other flights ensued.
"The primary goal is still alive: to be a technology demonstrator," Tzanetos said. But the drone is also now serving as a scout for Perseverance, as the duo explore an ancient river delta on the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater. Moreover, the focus is shifting to refining operations, teamwork and design decisions as NASA works to develop two Martian helicopters for its Red Planet sample-return effort.
The dual drones on the sample return mission, which is slated to launch in 2028, will serve as backups for Perseverance if the rover cannot ferry the samples it's currently collecting to a rocket-toting lander on its own; the rover has cached some sample tubes in a "depot" on Jezero's floor, which the little Ingenuity-like choppers could fetch and return to their mothership lander.
