We all have this image in our head of the pieces of hardware we’ve sent to Mars going about their business there with their shiny metal skin glittering in the blue-ish shade of Martian light. We imagine the rovers, for instance, as they were when they left this planet, mostly because that’s the last third-person view of the things we ever got to see.
When the Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero crater, though, it had with it a separate piece of hardware, tasked with seeing if sustained powered flight in Mars’ thin atmosphere is possible.
We’re talking about a small helicopter-like drone the world got to know as the Ingenuity. It was supposed to take a few short flights over the Martian surface and prove us humans right, then retire. It did, and then it far exceeded expectations.
Earlier this month NASA announced the Ingenuity performed its 50th flight above the Martian surface. It was taken, by all accounts, over “the most hazardous terrain it’s encountered on the Red Planet,” but that didn’t stop it from covering 1,057.09 feet (322.2 meters) in 145.7 seconds. The 50th flight also marked the moment when the helicopter set a new altitude record, flying at 59 feet (18 meters) above the reddish soil.
All of the above proves that whatever tech went into making the helicopter still works, and it’ll probably do so for some time to come. But all these achievements and broken records do come with a price, and that’s more than obvious in the most recent pic of the helicopter released by NASA.
You can see the Ingenuity (main photo of this piece) in the “clearest view of the rotorcraft since its first flight,” as NASA describes it. The pic was snapped by Perseverance itself from a distance of 75 feet (23 meters) in the days following the thing’s 50th flight, on April 16.
As a testimony of the harsh conditions up there, the machine’s blades and body are all covered in a thick layer of Martian dust. Considering those blades had just spun to take Ingenuity airborne, only two explanations for this are possible: either Martian dust clings to surfaces in a way not even fast blade revolutions are capable of shaking it off, or the climate there is so hostile a couple of days are more than enough to cover everything in the stuff.
To date, Ingenuity has been in the air for almost 90 minutes across its many flights, covering a total distance of 7.2 miles (11.5 km). There seems to be no plan to stop the flights over on Mars, so we expect the hardware to achieve further milestones in the near future.
That’s because, despite looking miserable, the machines “looks to be holding up well in the harsh Martian environment.”
Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies. Full profile
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