NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars sets speed record in third flight

the first craft to fly on another world hit a jogging pace for the first time on Sunday, his fastest speed yet. In his third flight to Mars, NASA’s little helicopter, nicknamed Ingenuity, flew the length of a football field and reached a maximum speed of about 4.5 miles per hour (2 meters per second), which is roughly the average pace at which humans jog.

In the video above, taken by the Perseverance rover’s MastCam-Z camera, the cosmically cute helicopter can be seen lifting the Martian surface to a height of 5 meters, then flying to the right and out of the frame for a moment. before coming back into view and landing near the same spot.

While commercial drones and the like obviously fly faster all the time, Ingenuity’s record shows that it holds up even when pushed to go beyond the speeds achieved in its tests on Earth.

“Today’s flight was what we had planned, and yet it was just amazing,” Dave Lavery, NASA’s program director for Ingenuity, said in a statement. “With this flight, we are demonstrating critical capabilities that will add an aerial dimension to future missions to Mars.”

The theft took place at 1:31 am PT on Sunday (12:33 pm local March time) and saw Ingenuity fly a total of 328 feet (100 meters). Data from the flight actually started arriving at mission control in California at 7:16 a.m. PT, including new footage from Ingenuity’s color camera and black-and-white navigation camera.

NASA says data collected from Ingenuity’s latest border pushing flight will inform both future helicopter flights and the design of larger rotorcraft that could fly to Mars in the future.

The Ingenuity team says a fourth flight is scheduled for later this week.

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