The Mars helicopter Ingenuity snapped eerily desolate photographs of the spent parachute and backshell that conveyed it to the Red Planet.
The images, which look like scenes from an apocalyptic sci-fi movie, came courtesy of the little helicopter's 19th flight on Tuesday. They show how the helicopter and Perseverance rover were protected as they descended to the surface of Mars. NASA scientists hope the images will help them understand how the craft handled the descent. The hope is that a future mission to Mars will be able to return samples collected by the Perseverance rover.
Ian Clark, former Perseverance systems engineer and now Mars Sample Return ascent phase lead at NASA, said in a statement that Perseverance had the best documented Mars landing in history with cameras showing everything from parachute inflation to touchdown. 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. If not, the pictures are still amazing.
The images were taken from above the ground. Ingenuity flew for 159 seconds after taking off. It traveled 1,181 feet and took 10 photographs.
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The chief pilot of Ingenuity at JPL said that they did a lot of maneuvering to get the shots they needed. He said that previous flights showed that the helicopter and its pilots could handle the acrobatics.
The images show the backshell, a saucer-like structure that covered Ingenuity and Perseverance on their final descent, and the parachute, which slowed the craft as it approached the Martian surface. The rover, helicopter and powered descent stage detached from the backshell and parachute at a altitude of 1.3 miles. The landing engines on the descent stage slowed the rover and helicopter, guiding them to a gentle landing.
The parachute and backshell hit the ground at 78 mph. The new images show the aftermath. According to NASA, the protective coating on the backshell seems to have survived the fiery entry into the Martian atmosphere. The suspension cables connecting the backshell to the parachute snake appear to be undamaged. A third of the 70.5-foot parachute is visible and undamaged.
The wreck was photographed from the ground by the Perseverance rover.
The Ingenuity helicopter has flown for 49 minutes and traveled 3.8 miles on Mars, according to NASA. The Jezero crater dry river valley is where Flight 27 is going. The remnants of a river that once spilled into a lake in the Jezero crater on Mars can be seen in this area. The goal of the current mission is to find signs of ancient Martian life in the ancient delta. The job of Ingenuity will be to get a bird's-eye view of the topography around the ridge, in part to scout a route to the top of the delta for Perseverance. The helicopter will look for areas where the rover can cache geological samples for a return to Earth.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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