The Perservance rover was able to capture images of the Ingenuity copter on Mars, which recently ended its mission due to an emergency landing after a failure in the visual navigation system.
The Mars copter Ingenuity has completed a three-year mission on the Red Planet. NASA admitted that the device exceeded all the expectations of scientists, completing dozens of times more flights than originally planned. The engineers expected only five flights, but the helicopter covered a total of 17 km and flew for 128.8 minutes, reports Aeronautics and Space Administration.
On January 18, Ingenuity rose to a height of about 12 meters, but during landing, experts lost contact with the Perseverance rover, which serves as a link between the helicopter and the Earth, and therefore the copter broke its blade. After this, Ingenuity transmitted its last photo to Earth; it will no longer be able to resume flights.
During its journey, Ingenuity independently selected landing sites on the difficult terrain of Mars, dealt with a faulty sensor, cleaned up after dust storms, and so on.
Now that the Ingenuity mission is complete, the copter team will conduct final tests of the helicopter’s systems and download the remaining images and data from onboard memory.
Let us remind you that earlier the Curiosity rover made photo a doorway perfectly carved into the Martian landscape.
Previously, scientists, exploring the cause of the disappearance of water on Mars, came to conclusionthat the rate at which a planet loses volatile components directly depends on its size.
Author: Anastasia Yugova
