NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter is taking a break to fly through the Martian skies.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which oversees the current mission to Mars, said it had decided to ground Ingenuity to pause the helicopter’s solar-powered batteries during the dust storms that currently plague it. envelop.
Seasonal dust storms greatly reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the solar arrays of the helicopter, making efficient battery charging virtually impossible.
“Dust levels are expected to decrease later in July, so the team has decided to pause the helicopter’s batteries for a few weeks and regain their daily charge status,” JPL said in a post on your website. “Weather permitting, Ingenuity is expected to return to the air in early August.”
The award-winning Ingenuity helicopter made history in April 2021 when it became the first aircraft to achieve a motorized and controlled flight to another planet. Since then, drone-like ingenuity has flown 28 more flights, the most recent being on June 11 this year.
With a height of 19.3 inches (49 cm) and tilting the scales to 4 pounds (2 kg), the Ingenuity’s longest individual flight carried 2,326 feet (709 meters) across the Martian surface. , while the fastest it has flown is 12.3 mph. (5.5 meters per second). The longest continuous flight time of the helicopter so far is 169.5 seconds.
JPL originally described Ingenuity as a demonstration mission. But the flying machine quickly exceeded expectations, prompting the team to send it on increasingly difficult flights while deploying it to help the Perseverance rover on the ground helping it find the most efficient routes through. from the surface of the red planet. He did this by capturing images of the terrain from an altitude of about 33 feet (10 meters) and passing the data to the rover team, which then used them to plan the safest and fastest routes between places of interest. .
In fact, the helicopter has worked so well that NASA seems willing to build more advanced flying machines for future missions to Mars and possibly to other planets.
Unsurprisingly for such an ambitious mission, the JPL team has faced a number of technical challenges with Ingenuity, although fortunately it has always been able to overcome them, even at 115 million. miles away.
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