Mars Helicopter Ingenuity Is Preparing For Its Longest Flight Yet

When it comes to deciding when and where the Ingenuity helicopter will fly, it’s not a simple matter of plugging in a destination and hitting a button. The team’s biggest concern is to preserve the helicopter for as long as possible, so they aim to make its flights as safe as they can. In a recent blog post, Ben Morrell of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — one of the engineers responsible for making Ingenuity’s flight plans — described how the team came to its decision about Ingenuity’s 24th and 25th flight.

The team were considering three options for the flight, Morrell writes: one single long flight, two shorter flights, or one tiny hop followed by a longer flight. In making this decision, the team had to contend with Mars’ changing seasons, which are making its already thin atmosphere even thinner. That provides a challenge for a helicopter that keeps itself aloft by moving air with its blades, so to adapt to the atmospheric conditions it has to spin its rotors even faster than before. But this higher rotor speed means components heat up faster, so the team has kept Ingenuity’s flights short, to 130 seconds or less to avoid overheating. Now, though, the Martian summer is coming to an end, which means the air density is rising again; that means the rotor speed can be reduced, allowing for longer flights.