NASA JPL image
NASA’s Mars rotor has set new records on the Red Planet. During the last flight, 25, the device traveled a record distance so far, also moving at record speeds.
At the beginning of April, another flight of the self-driving Ingenuity rover took place on the surface of Mars. It was not an ordinary flight, because the device traveled a record distance of 704 m during it, moving at a speed of 5.5 m / s. The described activity lasted 161 seconds and was the twenty-fifth flight on the red planet. For Ingenuita, it was also the second flight in a few days and the fifth in the last 30 days. The vehicle itself, which has been active on Mars for a year, showed no signs of wear.
However, during the last flight, the current record could not be broken – it is 169.5 seconds and it fell during the August activity of last year. It is also worth emphasizing that the described device exceeded the forecast for its service life by five times. Creativity was developed as a technical manifestation, so NASA planned to fly only five, but at this point we can watch the performance of the mini autonomous helicopters as they approach the number of 30 passes.
The drone hit the Red Planet in February 2021 with the Perseverance Rover. The main goal of this NASA mission is to search for traces of organisms believed to have been on Mars in areas that were once abundant in liquid water. The purpose of the drone itself was to confirm the operation of the flight system in difficult conditions of Mars.
The atmosphere of Mars consists mostly (more than 95%) of carbon dioxide, which is much less dense than Earth’s (only 1% of the density of our atmosphere). NASA engineers forced it to use the lightest material technology possible and the most efficient thrust, capable of generating the aerodynamic force needed to lift the drone. The success was achieved, among other things, by obtaining a sufficiently high rotational speed of the anti-rotating propellers – so that the machine could detach from the surface of the Red Planet.
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