Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter reaches 50th-flight milestone

Trevor Mogg
By

NASA’s plucky Ingenuity helicopter has completed its 50th flight on Mars.

To mark the special occasion, NASA posted a video (top) showing some of the key moments of Ingenuity’s mission so far.

Related Videos

Ingenuity completed its 50th flight on Thursday, April 13, JPL announced in a post on its website.

The trip saw the 4-pound, 19-inch-tall helicopter travel more than 1,057 feet (322.2 meters) in 145.7 seconds. It also achieved a new altitude record of 59 feet (18 meters) before touching down near the half-mile-wide (800-meter-wide) Belva Crater.

The feat is remarkable on a number of fronts. Ingenuity is the only aircraft ever to have flown on another planet, and when it arrived on Mars two years ago it was only expected to take a maximum of five flights.

But its impressive ability to handle the thin martian air and harsh climate inspired Ingenuity’s team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to push the device higher, faster, and, further in subsequent flights, and even use the aircraft and its on-board camera to assist Perseverance, the ground-based rover that arrived on Mars with Ingenuity in 2021.

With its work far from done, the JPL team is now eyeing another repositioning flight for Ingenuity before exploring the Fall River Pass region of Jezero Crater, a dried lake bed where Perseverance is searching for evidence of ancient life.

“Just as the Wright brothers continued their experiments well after that momentous day at Kitty Hawk in 1903, the Ingenuity team continues to pursue and learn from the flight operations of the first aircraft on another world,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division.

NASA’s helicopter has now flown for more than 89 minutes and covered more than than 7.1 miles (11.6 kilometers). Its speediest flight reached 15 mph just a couple of weeks ago, while the furthest the aircraft has traveled in one mission is 2,325.8 feet (708.9 meters) in April 2022. Data gathered during its flights have helped the Perseverance team to map out the safest routes for the rover to take as it navigates the red planet’s challenging terrain.

But the team has revealed that some of Ingenuity’s components are beginning to show signs of wear, and it recognizes that every groundbreaking mission will eventually come to a close.

“We have come so far, and we want to go farther,” said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead at JPL. “But we have known since the very beginning our time at Mars was limited, and every operational day is a blessing. Whether Ingenuity’s mission ends tomorrow, next week, or months from now is something no one can predict at present. What I can predict is that when it does, we’ll have one heck of a party.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Ingenuity takes shortest flight in Martian aviation history
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter recently completed a “short but significant” flight lasting a mere 18 seconds -- 13 seconds shorter than its debut flight on the red planet in April 2021.

Despite the brief nature of the flight, the success of the short hover just 16 feet off the ground successfully tested two new and important capabilities for the helicopter: hazard avoidance when landing, and the use of digital elevation maps to aid navigation.

Read more
Some weird debris just fell off the Mars helicopter Ingenuity
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is seen here in a close-up taken by Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard the Perseverance rover. This image was taken on April 5, the 45th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

The Mars helicopter Ingenuity has made it through a difficult winter and is back to flying, recently completing its 33rd flight since it landed on Mars along with the Perseverance rover in February 2021. The helicopter has been making gradually further flights since it came back into operations following a break from June to August, completing flight 31 on September 6, followed by flight 32 on September 17 and flight 33 on September 24.

For flight 33 the helicopter covered over 111 meters in just under a minute, with the helicopter heading toward the Jezero river delta to rejoin the Perseverance rover.

Read more
NASA’s observatory in an airplane, SOFIA, takes its last flight
NASA's SOFIA observatory in the air.

Since 2014, a very special airplane has been helping astronomers peer out beyond Earth's atmosphere. NASA's SOFIA, or Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, is an observatory fit into a modified Boeing 747 that has been operating for the past eight years. Now, it has taken its last flight and will be retiring from service.

The concept of SOFIA was to place a telescope into an airplane so it could fly above the majority of the water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere. This water vapor interferes with readings, so being above it allowed SOFIA to see further and with greater accuracy. The concept worked well and SOFIA contributed to a range of astronomical discoveries, however, earlier this year NASA announced it would be retiring the project. The costs of maintaining and running the observatory meant it was not a good value proposition in terms of the amount of research gained per dollar spent when compared to other telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope.

Read more