The Jet Propulsion Laboratory noted that he was in the air for 124.3 seconds
NEW YORK, December 17th. /tass/. The Ingenuity helicopter located on Mars has already made its 18th flight during its mission, which began ten months ago. This was announced on Friday by representatives of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) located in Pasadena (California), which is responsible for the implementation of this project.
"During a successful flight on Wednesday, the helicopter overcame 230 m, heading at a speed of 2.5 m/s to the northern border of the area called Seitah. He was in the air for 124.3 seconds," they noted on the JPL Twitter page. According to them, Ingenuity has flown by now in total over 3.8 km, rising to a height of up to 12 mi, accelerating to 5 m / s, spent almost 33 minutes in the air.
Earlier, NASA indicated that a feature of Seitah are sandy ridges that are difficult for wheeled rovers, and Ingenuity demonstrated the capabilities of the aircraft for exploring places on Mars that are difficult to reach by other means.
Seitah means "among the sands" in the language of the Navajo Indian tribe, the words from which NASA decided to use to designate a number of objects and zones on Mars as part of the current mission of the Perseverance rover, delivered together with Ingenuity to the Ezero crater on February 18. Their task is to try to find traces of the possible existence of life on the planet in the distant past.
The development of Ingenuity, which weighs 1.8 kg, cost $80 million. On Mars, he took off for the first time on April 19.
According to NASA, information about how Ingenuity behaves on the Red Planet is intended to help create the next Martian helicopter. It will be larger in size and equipped with six rotors. It is assumed that the weight of the device will be approximately 30 kg.
