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On Mars there “daily life” flows marked by the displacements of the rover on its surface and from the flights of the US drone. While Curiosity has left behind an iron meteorite, Perseverance has completed the deposit of backup samples in recent days and is now preparing to go up the delta. To precede it, at least in this part of the journey, there is NASA Ingenuity who can fly and start observing what the rover will find under its wheels in the coming weeks/months.
As we know the drone it was not expected to have such a long operational duration and it still seems to be in excellent health, presumably guaranteeing several more flights, thus accompanying the rover in exploration. Going up the delta of the river that once filled the lake formed inside the Jezero crater is important as there are rocks and areas that were once rich in water and where life could have thrived (in microbial form). In the past few hours the drone managed to complete even the 42nd flight to Mars.
NASA Ingenuity has completed the 42nd flight
As officially reported by JPL, the martian drone made the 42nd flight during the 697th sol (i.e. on February 4th). The horizontal movement amounted to 248 meters with a maximum altitude of 10 meters. The ground speed was equal to 3 m/s while the total duration was 137.2″. This also allowed to pass from the Beta airfield to the one called Gamma.
JPL’s official account on Twittergiving the news of the successful flight of NASA Ingenuity wanted to mess with the number “42” reminiscent of Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy writing “42 = the meaning of life, the universe and everything”. In the next post it was then added that “its interactive flight map shows Ingenuity leaving the relatively flat terrain of its initial flights and heading into the delta to assist NASA Perseverance with its next science campaign.”
Among the curiosities, as explained in an interview to one of the engineers, Ben Pipenbergwho worked at the martian drone (for the partner AeroVironment), we must think that the development of NASA Ingenuity it’s not recent. In fact, its conception dates back to a period between the end of the 90s and the early 2000s. The work then stopped to be resumed around 2012 to continue its development and actual construction.
Pipenberg then added some information on what will be the future drones used for the mission Mars Sample Return. These were potentially already planned before plans changed. However, they would have been a tertiary backup after direct delivery by Perseverance and a rover that would have been built by ESA. Having discarded the latter hypothesis, we moved on to drones similar to Ingenuity.
While maintaining an almost identical structure, they will still have some differences. For example the pair of drones they will be equipped with motorized wheels and a small robotic arm. The motivation is linked to the recovery of the sample tubes. This will allow drones to land at an adequate distance for recovery without necessarily having extreme landing accuracy. Once in the vicinity of the test tube, the motorized wheels can be used to make the final movements.
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