NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity has flown through alien skies before.
The #MarsHelicopter keeps going! The 18th flight of Ingenuity added 124.3 seconds to its overall time aloft on the Red Planet, according to officials with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
JPL officials said that Ingenuity covered 754 feet of ground while cruising at 5.6 mph.
It's getting harder to fly the helicopter on Mars.
The weight is 4 lbs. Ingenuity landed with NASA's Perseverance rover on the floor of the Jezero Crater, which hosted a big lake and a river billions of years ago.
Ingenuity wanted to show that powered flight is possible on Mars. Over the course of five initial flights, the little chopper checked off that box, then shifted into an extended mission, where it has been scouting for life-hunting, sample-caching Perseverance.
An impressive set of off-Earth accomplishments have been racked up by the rotorcraft. Ingenuity has spent nearly 33 minutes in the Martian air and visited 10 different Red Planet airfields.
Few thought we would make it to flight one. Teddy Tzanetos of JPL said in a statement that no one thought they would make it this far. The design and passion of the small operations team is reflected in the continued operations of the aircraft.
It's not to say that the little chopper has been sailing smoothly. Ingenuity had a glitch that interrupted the flow of navigation images to its onboard computer during its sixth flight, which took place on May 23.
The communications link between Ingenuity and Perseverance was disrupted during the descent of the helicopter. The mission team's assessment of the sortie was delayed because of this. The helicopter's data and imagery is sent to Earth via Perseverance and Mars.
The Apache Software Foundation, which developed the log4j programming code, has recently been revealed to have a flaw that can leave it vulnerable to hackers. JPL officials said that this is not the case, pointing to a more mundane cause.
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter is not susceptible to the log4j vulnerability. JPL officials wrote in an update Thursday that NASA takes cybersecurity very seriously and that they do not discuss specifics regarding the cybersecurity of agency assets.
The Ingenuity helicopter and the base station on the Perseverance rover had their data communications disrupted when the signal was blocked by elevated terrain as Ingenuity descended at the end of the flight. "Ingenuity 'flew behind a hill' or out of the rover's line of sight, briefly interrupted high-speed communications between the two spacecraft."
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