Mars helicopter flight is faster, farther

NASA’s Mars helicopter went up again Sunday, going faster and traveling a total distance that was about the length of a football field on its third trip through the wispy air of Mars.

Like the first two flights, the small experimental flying robot, named Ingenuity, perfectly executed its instructions from Earth. At 12:31 a.m. CDT — 12:33 p.m. local Mars time — it lifted 16 feet off the ground, then flew a round-trip distance of 328 feet before landing back where it started.

That was about 25 times as far as the second flight Thursday. The helicopter reached a top speed of 4.5 mph, and the flight lasted about 1 minute and 20 seconds.

The flight was a test of the helicopter’s navigation system, which visually keeps track of its location by comparing ground features recorded by its onboard camera. The farther it traveled, the more images its camera had to take to remember the landscape below. If it flew too fast, the helicopter could lose track of where it was.

“This is the first time we’ve seen the algorithm for the camera running over a long distance,” MiMi Aung, the helicopter’s project manager, said in a NASA news release. “You can’t do this inside a test chamber.”

With the success of the first three flights, the helicopter’s engineers have a bit more than a week to complete the final two, which will further push Ingenuity’s capabilities. Aung, the project’s manager, said after the first flight last week that she hoped the final one would travel as far as 2,300 feet.

The fourth flight will take off in a few days, NASA said.