Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, April 27 (Xinhua)-- NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity has completed its 51st flight on Mars, and during its 51st flight, it also took pictures of its partner, the Perseverance rover.

On its 51st flight on April 22, 2023, the "Smart" Mars helicopter took pictures of the "perseverance" rover from a height of 12 meters on the surface of Mars. In the photo, perseverance is motionless in the red soil, almost indistinguishable from the surrounding rocks. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) shared the photo on Twitter on April 24 and said Smart's 51st flight lasted nearly 137 seconds, covering a total of 188m.

CTOnews.com noticed that the two Mars rovers have been taking turns taking pictures of each other, and just last week, perseverance took a picture of dexterity, which showed a large amount of Martian dust accumulated on the helicopter's rotor.

Smart, a small helicopter weighing about 1.8 kilograms and with two rotors, initially planned to fly only five times in the thin Martian atmosphere to determine whether it would be feasible on Mars. It successfully flew on Mars for the first time in April 2021, proving that it is feasible to fly in a thin atmosphere like Mars. Because the distance between Mars and Earth is too far to operate remotely, Smart can only fly on its own according to a pre-programmed flight path.

Wit's mission is to provide reconnaissance and navigation assistance to the perseverance rover to help it look for signs of ancient life on Mars. Perseverance is also busy collecting soil and rock samples that will one day return to Earth through the Mars sample return mission.

The Mars sample recovery program, which is being carried out jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), will send helicopters to Mars to recover samples stored in the sample tube of perseverance, if necessary. The baseline plan is for perseverance to hand over its sample tube to a rocket-mounted lander; if the rover fails to complete the task, the helicopter will do the job. The collected samples will be sent to an orbiter and then transported back to Earth. If all goes well, the samples will land in the Utah desert in 2033 for scientists to analyze.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.