(NASA)
The marscopter drone Ingenuity made its eighteenth flight, the first since the incident with the loss of communication with the rover during the landing phase.
The helicopter flew 230 meters in 124 seconds and is fully operational.
Initially, the developers of Ingenuity planned to work with the drone on Mars for one month, having completed five short flights during this time.
However, at the moment, the drone has been operating on the Red Planet for more than seven months, having already completed 18 flights.
The total flight time of the device exceeded 30 minutes, and in terms of range, it reached 3.6 kilometers.
The drone will work until its technical condition becomes critical.
Currently, the helicopter is making short flights, returning to its first airfield, from where it made its first flight.
At the final stage of the seventeenth flight, which took place on December 5, there was a loss of communication between the helicopter and the Perseverance rover.
Telemetry analysis showed that the drone was fully operational and made a soft landing in automatic mode, and on December 14, the drone team began preparations for a new flight.
Previously, there were reports that communication problems during the seventeenth flight of the drone could be caused by the use of the Log4j library, in which a critical vulnerability was recently discovered.
However, NASA denied them, stating that the marscopter does not run Apache or Log4j, and the communication problems were caused by the hill.
On December 15, 2021, Ingenuity completed its eighteenth flight, which lasted 124.3 seconds.
The helicopter took off 10 meters upward, after which it covered 230 meters at a speed of 2.5 meters per second and landed.
During the flight, the drone received color and black-and-white images of the surrounding area.
Sources:
- NASA’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1471887952317796353