Mars helicopter Ingenuity snaps epic photo of rover tracks, will attempt 3rd flight Sunday

This photo, snapped on April 22, 2021 by NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity, shows tracks made by the Perseverance rover on Jezero Crater's floor. “This is the first color image of the Martian surface taken by an aerial vehicle while it was aloft,” NASA officials wrote.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA's history-making Mars helicopter Ingenuity will make its third Red Planet flight this weekend, if all goes according to plan.

The Ingenuity team is targeting early Sunday morning (April 25) for sortie number three. The flight plan calls for Ingenuity to get about 16.5 feet (5 meters) above the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater, travel a total of 330 feet (100 m) and stay aloft for 80 seconds, chief pilot Håvard Grip of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote in a blog post today (April 23).

Ingenuity's first two flights were not so involved. On its groundbreaking first flight, which occurred on Monday (April 19), Ingenuity went straight up and down, attained a maximum altitude of about 10 feet (3 m) and stayed aloft for 39.1 seconds. On Thursday (April 22), the solar-powered helicopter remained airborne for nearly 52 seconds, got more than 16.5 feet (5 m) high and moved laterally a total of 13 feet (4 m).

During that second flight, Ingenuity snapped a photo of Jezero's floor and the tracks made by its much larger partner, NASA's Perseverance rover. It's "the first color image of the Martian surface taken by an aerial vehicle while it was aloft," NASA officials wrote in a caption for the newly unveiled photo, which Grip featured in his blog post today. (Ingenuity took photos during its first flight as well, but apparently only with its black-and-white navigation camera.)

Michael was a science writer for the Idaho National Laboratory and has been an intern at Wired.com, The Salinas Californian newspaper, and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He has also worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz.