NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has reached new heights, literally speaking! The gadget is part of the Mars 2020 mission along with the Perseverance rover, meaning that it’s flying around on the Red Planet to collect data.
Ingenuity has now reached 46 feet (14 meters) above the surface of Mars over the weekend. That’s a new altitude record that NASA can boast about when it comes to its little helicopter! The achievement was part of Flight 35 of Ingenuity, and the famous space agency didn’t hesitate to inform everyone about the great event!
NASA’s new tweet announcing Ingenuity’s achievement yesterday, December 6, already gathered over a thousand likes. See for yourself:
An all-time high for the #MarsHelicopter!
Ingenuity completed Flight 35 over the weekend and set a new max altitude record, hitting 46 ft (14 meters) above the Martian surface. See more stats in the flight log: https://t.co/7DMHj9LkNX pic.twitter.com/qAj5H9Z68C— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) December 6, 2022
The information was also made public by NASA’s official website, just in case you needed more confirmation.
Ingenuity’s role, to be more precise, is to put powered and controlled flight on another planet to the test for the first time. It arrived on Mars along with the Perseverance rover, which had its touchdown back in early 2021. The goal of Perseverance is to collect samples from our neighboring planet and bring them to Earth for analysis.
Steve Jurczyk from NASA stated at the moment of the touchdown, as the space agency’s website quotes:
This landing is one of those pivotal moments for NASA, the United States, and space exploration globally – when we know we are on the cusp of discovery and sharpening our pencils, so to speak, to rewrite the textbooks,
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission embodies our nation’s spirit of persevering even in the most challenging of situations, inspiring, and advancing science and exploration. The mission itself personifies the human ideal of persevering toward the future and will help us prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
As you probably already expected, NASA’s Perseverance rover also looks for traces of life on Mars. Astronomers are optimistic that, at least in the distant past, some primitive forms of life might have existed on the Red Planet.