NASA’s tiny Ingenuity copter completed a successful fifth flight on Mars on Friday, this time taking a one-way trip to a new landing site as it begins a role demonstrating its scouting savvy.
Ingenuity now sits on its new airfield about 1.5 football fields south of its original Wright Brothers Field awaiting further instructions from engineers on Earth relayed through the Perseverance rover.
The rover, meanwhile, is rolling southward to begin science and sample collection, with the first sample to be dug up sometime in July. Eventually the samples will make their way back to Earth on a future mission to be examined for evidence of ancient microbial life.
“The plan forward is to fly Ingenuity in a manner that does not reduce the pace of Perseverance science operations,” said Bob Balaram, chief engineer for Ingenuity at JPL, in a statement. During its five flights over the past month, Ingenuity has relied on Perseverance to regularly transmit data and images back to Earth taking several hours most days.
The fifth flight began at 3:26 p.m. EDT on Friday, lasting 108 seconds, before it arrived at a new flat airfield location 423 feet to the south that was discovered via images taken by Ingenuity during its fourth flight. Upon reaching that spot, it climbed to a record height of 33 feet, about double previous flights, then took high resolution images that will be useful in future flights and rover expeditions.
Balaram said Ingenuity could fly two more times in the next month or so in an operations demonstration of its scouting capabilities and to make aerial observations of places a rover cannot reach with detailed stereo images from its position above the ground. It will stay close enough to Perseverance to allow efficient communications of images and data.
Future space missions will rely on drones flying in the aerospace above the surface of moons and planets and will be able to make use of Ingenuity’s insights about navigation and autonomous piloting. A week ago, engineers from Ingenuity and the future Dragonfly drone flying aboard a rocket in 2027 to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, discussed the differences and similarities between the two craft.
Titan will be much larger—the size of a car—and will be able to fly tens of miles at a time, compared to 4-pound Ingenuity and its range of 423 feet or 129 meters on its fifth flight. A round-trip fourth flight took Ingenuity 872 feet or 266 meters over nearly 2 minutes.
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NASA on Friday also released a recording of the sounds Ingenuity made on its fourth flight on April 30. A microphone on the rover’s SuperCam picked up the sounds as Perseverance was parked 262 feet away. The helicopter’s blades were spinning at 2,537 rpm, but the sound was muffled by the thin Marian atmosphere and Martian wind gusts during the initial moments of the flight. The helicopter emitted a humming sound which can be faintly heard above the sound of the wind.
The audio was recorded in mono, and scientists isolated the 84 hertz helicopter blade sounds by reducing the frequencies below 80 hertz and above 90 hertz and increasing the volume of the remaining signal. Some frequencies were clipped out to bring out the helicopter hum.
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