April 26th, 2021
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#35
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Senior Member
Join Date: May 2014
Posts: 15,248
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Ingenuity's third flight in the books
Quote:
Make it a hat trick on the Red Planet for NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity.
The 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) chopper aced its third-ever Martian flight early this morning (April 25), adding to its already impressive resume.
"Third flight is in the history books," officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California wrote on Twitter. "Our #Mars Helicopter continues to set records, flying faster and farther. The space chopper is demonstrating critical capabilities that could enable the addition of an aerial dimension to future missions to Mars and beyond."
And today's sortie was significantly more complex than Ingenuity's previous two flights. which took place on Monday (April 19) and Thursday (April 22), respectively. On its historic, 39-second debut hop - the first powered, controlled flight for an aircraft on a world beyond Earth - the solar-powered helicopter went straight up and down and reached a maximum altitude of about 16.5 feet (5 meters).
Ingenuity went about that high on flight number two, but stayed up for nearly 52 seconds and moved side-to-side a total of 13 feet (4 m).
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https://www.space.com/mars-helicopte...flight-success
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