At jogging speed… A Mars helicopter that also succeeded in its third test flight

Ingenuity, a Mars helicopter developed by NASA, made its third flight to Mars. This time, I flew from the home position to a location 50m north of Mars, and the flight speed reached 4.5km/h, which means jogging. In the second flight, the flight speed was 1.8 km/h, and the speed of human walking was about.

There are now two flight tests scheduled by Ingenuity. NASA says the rest of the flight test will be quite adventurous and will test the limits of Ingenuity.

It was expected that it would be quite difficult to fly on Mars, which has only about a 160th of the air pressure than Earth, but Ingenuity, which overcame the problem before the first flight, smoothly conducts a test flight, proving that a helicopter can fly sufficiently on Mars. If the remaining two test flights can be completed without any problems, NASA’s future Mars missions will probably enter an era of extensive exploration through a bird-like prospect with a helicopter-type probe all the time.

In the second test flight, Ingenuity continued to fly 51.9 seconds in the air, traveling 5m in height and 2m in the east direction. The turn also rotated 276 degrees. Related information can be found here.