NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter Sets Altitude Record on Mars

NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter Sets Altitude Record on Mars
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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:

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.


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Even since he was a child, Cristian was staring curiously at the stars, wondering about the Universe and our place in it. Today he's seeing his dream come true by writing about the latest news in astronomy. Cristian is also glad to be covering health and other science topics, having significant experience in writing about such fields.

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