Amazing! Ingenuity Helicopter Flies to the Perseverance Backshell and Parachute to See Them Close Up

We reported earlier this month that the Perseverance rover spotted its parachute and backshell in the distance. The rover was brought to the surface of Mars on February 18, 2021.

The Ingenuity helicopter snapped better images of those items while it was in the air.

What a mess! The backshell split into pieces when it crashed to the surface.

The backshell would have hit the surface at about 126 kph/78 mph, which was the plan all along, according to NASA. The parachute and suspension lines are visible in the photos. The orange-and-white parachute is 7 feet wide.

The items were necessary to bring Perseverance safely to the surface of Mars. During those seven minutes, the incoming rover comes screaming into the atmosphere of Mars with high temperatures and extreme gravity. The heat shield-covered backshell slows the lander to under 1,600 kph. It is safe to deploy the supersonic parachute at that point. The Sky Crane is used to gently lower the rover to the surface after the parachute slows the lander enough to where the backshell and parachute are ejected.

It all has to happen automatically, with no input from engineers back on Earth.

NASA engineers love to see these items, even in their crashed state, because they can give valuable insights for future missions. The perspective engineers were hoping for was provided by Ingenuity's 26th flight. Ingenuity took 10 aerial images of the debris field.

One of the upcoming planned missions that will benefit the most from these images is the future Mars Sample Return Lander, which is part of a multimission campaign that would bring Perseverance's samples of Martian rocks, atmosphere, and sediment back to Earth for detailed analysis. Engineers for this mission requested the images from the Ingenuity team.

Ingenuity flight operations were extended by NASA to perform flights such as this, said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity's team lead. The utility of aerial platforms on Mars is demonstrated by the Mars Sample Return request.

A final verdict will need several weeks of analysis.

Ian Clark, former Perseverance systems engineer and now Mars Sample Return ascent phase lead, said that Perseverance had the best documented Mars landing in history. It will be amazing if they either reinforce that our systems worked as we think they worked or provide a single dataset of engineering information that we can use for Mars Sample Return planning. The pictures are still amazing.