Ingenuity’s ninth flight provided imagery that will help the Perseverance rover team develop its science plan going forward.
Images snapped on July 5, 2021 by NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter on its ambitious ninth flight have offered scientists and engineers working with the agency’s Perseverance Mars rover an unprecedented opportunity to scout out the road ahead. Ingenuity provided new insight into where different rock layers begin and end, each layer serving as a time capsule for how conditions in the ancient climate changed at this location. The flight also revealed obstacles the rover may have to drive around as it explores Jezero Crater.
During the flight — designed to test the helicopter’s ability to serve as an aerial scout — Ingenuity soared over a dune field nicknamed “Séítah.” Perseverance is making a detour south around those dunes, which would be too risky for the six-wheeled rover to try crossing.
The color images from Ingenuity, taken from a height of around 33 feet (10 meters), offer the rover team much greater detail than they get from the orbiter images they typically use for route planning. While a camera like HiRISE (the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can resolve rocks about 3 feet (1 meter) in diameter, missions usually rely on rover images to see smaller rocks or terrain features.
“Once a rover gets close enough to a location, we get ground-scale images that we can compare to orbital images,” said Perseverance Deputy Project Scientist Ken Williford of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “With Ingenuity, we now have this intermediate-scale imagery that nicely fills the gap in resolution.”
“The helicopter is an extremely valuable asset for rover planning because it provides high-resolution imagery of the terrain we want to drive through,” said Toupet. “We can better assess the size of the dunes and where bedrock is poking out. That’s great information for us; it helps identify which areas may be traversable by the rover and whether certain high-value science targets are reachable.”
A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was built by JPL, which also manages the technology demonstration project for NASA Headquarters. It is supported by NASA’s Science, Aeronautics Research, and Space Technology mission directorates. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, provided significant flight performance analysis and technical assistance during Ingenuity’s development. AeroVironment Inc., Qualcomm, and SolAero also provided design assistance and major vehicle components. Lockheed Martin Space designed and manufactured the Mars Helicopter Delivery System.
JPL manages the MRO mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The University of Arizona, in Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colorado.
For more about Perseverance, visit mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/ and nasa.gov/perseverance.
Source: NASA HQ, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Caltech
