Mars helicopter gets extra month of flying by Nasa

NASA’s little Mars helicopter has gotten a reprieve.

Instead of wrapping up flight tests at the beginning of May, NASA is giving its Ingenuity helicopter at least an extra month to tackle tough new terrain and serve as a scout for its companion rover, Perseverance.

Officials announced the flight extension on Friday, following three short flights in under two weeks for the $85 million tech demo. Soon afterward, there was more good news: Ingenuity — the first powered aircraft to soar at another planet — had aced its fourth flight at Mars.

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For Friday's trip, Ingenuity traveled 266 meters at a height of 5 meters for two minutes, considerably farther and longer than before.

An attempt on Thursday had failed because of a known software error.

On its fifth flight in another week or so, the 1.8-kilogram chopper will move to a new airfield on Mars, allowing the rover to finally start focusing on its own rock-sampling mission. The rover is seeking signs of ancient life at Jezero Crater, home to a lush lakebed and river delta billions of years ago.

The helicopter team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, expects to chalk up a sixth and seventh flight in May.

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The previous limit had been five. If all goes well, the helicopter mission could go even longer.

“Ingenuity loves Mars,” project manager MiMi Aung told reporters. “It takes off and I almost feel the freedom that it feels."

Now Perseverance will take priority, scoping out the rocks around the February 18 landing site. Ingenuity hitched a ride to Mars on the rover's belly, launching from Cape Canaveral last summer. Managers expect the rover to collect its first sample in July for return to Earth in a decade.

The rover will continue to relay data and pictures from the helicopter, but stop taking its own chopper shots. The two spacecraft must be within a 1 kilometre of one another, for communication relay.

Designed to operate on Mars for 30 days, Ingenuity probably can survive the freezing Martian nights — and repeated flights in the extremely thin atmosphere — for at least another few months.

“We really do expect some finite life," Aung said, “and so it will be a race between how long these parts surprise us in surviving."