NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Sets New Altitude Record

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter reached new heights over the weekend.

During Saturday’s Flight 35, the robot hovered 46 feet(Opens in a new window) (14 meters) above the Martian surface for nearly one minute, breaking its previous maximum altitude record of 39 feet (12 meters).

“An all-time high for the Mars Helicopter,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) tweeted(Opens in a new window) on Tuesday, alongside a series of Red Planet images captured by Ingenuity.

Tweet(Opens in a new window)

Last month, the helicopter completed its 34th flight: a “short but significant” 18-second venture that saw it hover 16 feet in the air before landing. The journey was notable because the craft was able to test out hazard avoidance tech and digital elevation maps enabled by a recent software update. This “increases Ingenuity’s accuracy, allowing the pilots to target smaller airfields going forward,” according to Joshua Anderson, project operations lead at JPL.

“In prior flights, Ingenuity’s pilots have needed to find airfields free of any rocks or other obstacles that could potentially damage the vehicle when landing,” Anderson said(Opens in a new window) last month. Jezero Crater, where the Perseverance rover landed in February 2021, “is a rocky place, so safe airfields have been tough to find.”

It hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing for the Ingenuity “Ginny” Mars Helicopter, which was grounded in June when a sensor failed. Designed for test flights during warm Martian springs, the machine does not cope well with -112 degrees Farenheit in the winter. With some rest and a software patch, however, Ingenuity was soon back up and running.