Ingenuity Mars Helicopter successfully completed a second, more challenging short flight on Mars Thursday. It climbed as expected, about 16 feet above Wright Brothers Field in Jezero Crater, then moved laterally about 7 feet before retracing its path and returning to the surface.
The second flight lasted about 50 seconds at 5:30 a.m. EDT, with data received on Earth about 9:21 a.m. EDT and reported over Twitter at 9:45 a.m. EDT, NASA/JPL said.
The first historic flight was on Monday, rising just 10 feet and rotating in place before landing with the total maneuver lasting over 40 seconds.
All the piloting instructions for the two flights (and potentially three more) are done remotely in advance, shipped by engineers from Earth to Mars, a distance of 178 million miles. It takes nearly four hours to receive some of the basic data flight data from Mars.
For the third flight, Ingenuity is expected to rise about 15 feet, but then fly laterally much farther, about 150 feet and back again before landing.
Flights 4 and 5 will allow more chances to experiment, and Project Manager MiMi Aung said she wants to go “really far and fast” as much as 1,800 feet from the liftoff location.
In addition to the continuing Ingenuity tech demo, NASA reported on Wednesday it had successfully extracted oxygen from the Martian atmosphere in the MOXIE tech demo aboard the Perverance rover. The MOXIE test took place April 20 after the entire mission landed on Mars Feb. 18
Converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars will be essential for life support on the Red Planet and rocket fuel for future trips home, NASA said.
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