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NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity is preparing for its 11th flight above Earth, which could take place early Thursday morning (August 5).
The 4-pound (1.8 kilogram) Ingenuity landed with the Perseverance rover inside the Jezero de Mars crater on February 18. Six weeks later, the small rotorcraft deployed from Perseverance’s belly and began a month-long flight campaign to demonstrate that aerial exploration is possible on the Red Planet.
Ingenuity successfully completed all five flights during this period, so NASA gave the project an extended mission focused on showcasing the reconnaissance potential of Martian helicopters. The helicopter has made five extended mission sorties so far, and is on the verge of another.
Video: Watch Ingenuity explore the intriguing ‘Raised Ridges’ in a new video
The Ingenuity team is preparing for the next helicopter mission, which will be its 11th overall to the Red Planet. The flight will take off around 12:33 a.m. local time in Mars a day ahead, possibly as early as tomorrow (August 5), wrote Josh Ravich, head of mechanical engineering for Ingenuity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. update released today (August 4). If tomorrow is indeed a departure, that would put take-off at 12:50 a.m. EDT (04:50 GMT), he added.
Ingenuity will climb to an altitude of 39 feet (12 meters), then sail to a new airfield at approximately 1,260 feet (385 m), reaching a top speed of around 11 mph (18 km / h). The flight will take about 130 seconds, Ravich wrote.
Although Ingenuity takes a few photos during Flight 11, the main goal is to bring the small helicopter to this new airfield, from where it can further explore southern Séítah, which is part of a strange region of sandy ripples whose rough terrain is difficult for the large rover to cross.
“As requested by the science team at Perseverance,” Ravich wrote, the new site “will become the staging area for at least one reconnaissance flight of the geologically intriguing region of South Séítah. Wish us luck and see you soon at South Séítah! “
Perseverance, for its part, is preparing to take an important step in its mission: collecting its first sample from Mars. The car-sized rover will eventually recover dozens of samples from the Red Planet, which will be transported to Earth by a joint NASA-European Space Agency campaign, possibly as early as 2031.
Perseverance is currently in an area called “Crater Floor Fractured Rough,” which features rocks that the mission team believe are as old as Jezero Crater itself. But the rover’s managers plan to navigate and investigate close to southern Séítah, if possible, in the relatively near future.
Mike Wall is the author of “The low“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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