“Another successful flight of Ingenuity! The Mars helicopter completed its eighth flight on Monday, “the laboratory announced on the social network. In a short tweet, she also said that the helicopter had flown a distance of 160 meters in 77.4 seconds. He landed at another new location 133.5 meters from the robotic vehicle Perseverance, with which the Ingenuity landed on Mars on February 18 as part of the JPL mission called Mars 2020.
On Monday, Ingenuity completed his second trouble-free transfer through the Martian atmosphere in a row after the difficulties that occurred during the sixth flight. The machine experienced technical problems at the end of the flight test on May 22, but finally landed safely. According to JPL experts, everything was caused by a certain vulnerability of the timing system.
The helicopter was originally scheduled for five flights, but the continued success of testing has led scientists to extend the program and experiment with more demanding demonstrations. The speed and distance increased and from the fifth flight the helicopter always landed in another place. According to Space.com, Ingenuity should keep up with Perseverance and follow its route in order to test the possibilities of tandem cooperation of vehicles and flying devices in scientific work.
Two machines, two missions
Perseverance and Ingenuity have their own programs. The helicopter is not equipped with scientific instruments, its only task is to test the possibility of using similar flying devices in the future when examining the surface of extraterrestrial bodies. The robotic rover’s mission includes looking for signs of possible past, not present, life on Mars, collecting data on the planet’s climate and geology, and collecting samples of rocks and dust that should be transported to Earth sometime in the future.
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