NASA's Ingenuity Helicopter Prepares For Its Longest Flight On Mars

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter while flying on Mars. (NASA)

JAKARTA – NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, which was on Mars, reportedly made its 24th flight on Sunday, April 3. Now, Ingenuity is being prepared for long-haul flights on its 25th flight.

Initially the helicopter was only designed to carry out five flights, but because of the success of its mission, Ingenuity is now assigned to help the Perseverance rover find a number of research targets on Mars.

An Ingenuity helicopter flew into the Jezero crater, which is the site of an ancient river delta. It is said that scientists claim that Jezero was once a place of abundant water for billions of years. Here too there is microscopic life that once formed.

Perseverance was designed to look for evidence of ancient life at the site. The Ingenuity helicopter, currently in Séítah, was assigned to assist him. This means that Ingenuity must fly from its current location to Jezero.

In a recent blog post, one of the engineers responsible for Ingenuity's flight, Ben Morrell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory described how the team arrived at its decision regarding Ingenuity's 24th and 25th flights.

Reporting from SlashGear, the team is considering three options for the flight, Morrell wrote: one single long flight, two short flights, or one small jump followed by a longer flight. In making this decision, the team had to deal with the changing seasons on Mars, which made its already thin atmosphere even thinner.

These conditions present a challenge for the helicopter which keeps itself at an altitude by moving the air with its propellers, so to adapt to atmospheric conditions, Ingenuity has to rotate its propellers faster than before.

But this higher rotor speed means components heat up faster, so the team made Ingenuity flights short, up to 130 seconds or less to avoid overheating. However, now that the Martian summer is coming to an end, which means the density of the air is increasing again. This means that the rotor speed can be reduced, allowing for a longer flight.

Apart from that, the team also wanted to keep Ingenuity's speed on par with Perseverance which was speeding at high speed to Jezero. Therefore, the helicopter is scheduled to reach the ancient river delta before the Perseverance rover robot. If this is successful, Ingenuity will communicate with Perseverance to avoid collisions throughout the rover's journey.

The 24th flight covered a distance of 47 meters taking 70 seconds in the air. The 25th flight will be the longest journey for Ingenuity to cover a distance of 704 meters and is predicted to last 160 seconds. However, NASA itself has not announced the exact time of Ingenuity's 25th flight.