August 16, 2023
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured this video of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s 54th flight on Aug. 3, 2023. After performing a preflight “wiggle examine” with its rotors, the helicopter takes off, hovers at an altitude of 16 ft (5 meters), and rotates to the left, earlier than touching again down. The mission carried out the quick pop-up flight to examine Ingenuity’s navigation system.
The video was captured by the rover’s Mastcam-Z imager from a distance of about 180 ft (55 meters).
Arizona State College in Tempe leads the operations of the Mastcam-Z instrument, working in collaboration with Malin House Science Methods in San Diego, on the design, fabrication, testing, and operation of the cameras, and in collaboration with the Niels Bohr Institute of the College of Copenhagen on the design, fabrication, and testing of the calibration targets.
A key goal for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, together with the seek for indicators of historic microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and previous local weather, pave the way in which for human exploration of the Purple Planet, and be the primary mission to gather and cache Martian rock and regolith (damaged rock and mud).
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European House Company), would ship spacecraft to Mars to gather these sealed samples from the floor and return them to Earth for in-depth evaluation.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is a part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration method, which incorporates Artemis missions to the Moon that can assist put together for human exploration of the Purple Planet.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the company by Caltech in Pasadena, California, constructed and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
For extra about Perseverance:
mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
