The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which oversees the current mission to Mars, said it decided to land Ingenuity to give the helicopter’s solar batteries a break during dust storms currently raging around it. Seasonal dust storms greatly reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the helicopter’s solar arrays, making efficient battery charging nearly impossible. “Dust levels are expected to subside later in July, so the team decided to give the helicopter’s batteries a break for a few weeks and back up their daily state of charge,” JPL said in a post on its website. “Weather permitting, Ingenuity is expected to be back on the air around early August.” The award-winning Ingenuity helicopter made history in April 2021 when it became the first aircraft to achieve powered, controlled flight on another planet. Since then, the drone-like machine has gone on another 28 flights, with the most recent taking place on June 11 of this year. Standing 19.3 inches (49 centimeters) tall and tipping the scales at 4 pounds (2 kilograms), Ingenuity’s longest flight took it 2,326 feet (709 meters) to the Martian surface, while its fastest flight is 12.3 mph (5.5 meters per second). The helicopter’s longest continuous flight time to date is 169.5 seconds. JPL initially described Ingenuity as a demonstration mission. But the flying machine quickly exceeded expectations, prompting the team to send it on increasingly challenging flights, while also developing it to assist the ground-based Perseverance rover by helping it find the most efficient routes on the red planet’s surface. It did this by capturing images of the ground from an altitude of about 33 feet (10 meters) and passing the data to the rover team, which then used it to plan the safest and fastest routes between locations of interest. Indeed, the helicopter has performed so well that NASA appears poised to build more advanced flying machines for future missions to Mars and possibly other planets. Unsurprisingly for such an ambitious mission, the JPL team faced a number of technical challenges with Ingenuity, though fortunately it was always able to overcome them — even from 115 million miles away.

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