As it turns out, NASA’s Ingenuity is the little Martian helicopter that could. Earlier this month, the Mars-based chopper flew for just over two minutes, officially crossing a major milestone on the planet—it’s now flown for over 100 minutes. Paart of the space agency’s larger Perseverance mission, Ingenuity has been tasked with going on short flights to collect additional data to help the Perseverance rover chart its path across the planet.
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Ingenuity has officially flown for 102.4 minutes through its 57 flights, translating to roughly 13,130 meters traveled or just over eight miles. The helicopter has, by all measures, surpassed the expectations of researchers working on the mission. While Ingenuity has been collecting data from the air, Perseverance has been collecting soil samples on the ground.
“Anniversaries are a time of reflection and celebration, and the Perseverance team is doing a lot of both,” Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley said in a NASA press release earlier this year. “Perseverance has inspected and performed data collection on hundreds of intriguing geologic features, collected 15 rock cores, and created the first sample depot on another world. With the start of the next science campaign, known as ‘Upper Fan,’ on Feb. 15, we expect to be adding to that tally very soon.”
As it stands now, those samples are set to return to Earth at some point in 2031. A pick-up craft is supposed to launch towards Mars in 2026 before picking up the samples and returning back.
“The samples Perseverance has been collecting will provide a key chronology for the formation of Jezero Crater,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said last year. “Each one is carefully considered for its scientific value.”
“Right now, we take what we know about the age of impact craters on the Moon and extrapolate that to Mars,” added Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Bringing back a sample from this heavily cratered surface in Jezero could provide a tie-point to calibrate the Mars crater dating system independently, instead of relying solely on the lunar one.”
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