NASA's mini-helicopter Ingenuity successfully completed its third flight on Mars on Sunday, moving farther and faster than ever, with a top speed of 2 meters per second. After two initial flights during which the spacecraft hovered over the surface of the red planet, the helicopter in this third flight covered 50 meters of distance.
"Today's flight was what we planned and yet it was nothing short of amazing, " said Dave Lavery, program executive for the Ingenuity project.
The Perseverance rover, which brought the 1.8 kilogram helicopter to Mars, filmed the third 80-second flight. The lateral flight was a test for the helicopter's autonomous navigation system, which completes the route according to the information previously received.
"If Ingenuity flies too fast, the flight algorithm cannot track surface features," NASA explained in a statement about the flight.
NASA has announced that it is already preparing a fourth flight. Each flight is planned to be of increasing difficulty to push Ingenuity to its limits. The experiment will be over in a month to allow Perseverance to return to its main task: looking for signs of past microbial life on Mars.
There are less than two weeks left until Perseverance continues on its main mission of searching for alien fossils.
