The eighth flight took place on June 21, the helicopter covered a distance of 160 meters in 77.4 seconds
NEW YORK, June 25. /TASS/. The Ingenuity helicopter located on Mars flew a total of almost a kilometer during eight flights, which began on April 19. This was reported on Thursday by the American specialized portal SpaceNews, citing a representative of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Teddy Tzanetos.
According to him, the eighth flight took place on June 21. The helicopter covered a distance of 160 meters in 77.4 seconds and is now 133.5 meters from the Perseverance rover, with which it was delivered to the Jezero crater on February 18. Tzanetos recalled that on April 30, Ingenuity flew a total of 266 meters, spending 118 seconds in the air.
"We hope that our project will last at least a few more months, and the device will make new flights," the portal quotes Tzanetos, who noted that the plans are to try to send the helicopter flying immediately at a distance of 1 kilometer, for which it will need to be in the air for up to three minutes. "This will be the limit of its capabilities," the representative of the JPL added.
As Tzanetos pointed out, information about how Ingenuity behaves on the surface of the Red Planet is intended to help create the next Martian helicopter. It will be larger in size and equipped with six main propellers. It is assumed that the weight of the device will be approximately 30 kg, while Ingenuity weighs 1.8 kg. The representative of the JPL did not specify how much the new project will cost and when it is planned to send a helicopter to Mars.
NASA expects to use Ingenuity, in the development of which $ 80 million was invested, to study those areas where a six-wheeled rover cannot reach, as well as to create three-dimensional maps of the planet's surface and solve other scientific problems. The purpose of the rover's mission is to try to find traces of the possible existence of life on Mars in the distant past.
