Mars helicopter Ingenuity snaps incredible aerial photo of Perseverance rover during 51st flight

News
By Brett Tingley
published

The shot shows Perseverance and its mission from a new and dramatic angle.

an aerial photograph of the surface of Mars with Perseverance rover in the background
A photograph of the Perseverance rover and the Martian surface taken by the Ingenuity helicopter on April 22, 2023, during its 51st Red Planet flight. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

With over 50 Mars flights under its belt, NASA's Ingenuity helicopter continues to impress.

During its 51st flight on Saturday (April 22), Ingenuity took a photo of its companion robot, the Perseverance rover, from 40 feet (12 meters) above the Martian surface. In the photo, Perseverance can be seen motionless in the planet's red soil in the background, nearly indistinguishable from the large rocks strewn across the Red Planet landscape.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) shared the image on Twitter on Monday (April 24), adding that Ingenuity's 51st flight lasted for just under 137 seconds and saw the small helicopter travel for a total of 617 feet (188 m). 

Related: Mars helicopter Ingenuity: First aircraft to fly on Red Planet

The two robots on the surface of Mars have been taking turns snapping impressive photos of one another. Just last week, Perseverance took a picture of Ingenuity showing an impressive amount of Martian dust built up on the helicopter's rotors.

Ingenuity's most recent hop came just nine days after its 50th flight. The 4-pound (1.8 kilogram) dual-rotor helicopter was originally intended to make just five flights in the thin Martian atmosphere to determine if flight was feasible on the Red Planet. 

Since its first flight in April 2021, the plucky helicopter has continued to prove itself capable of repeated takeoffs and landings. "She has blown out of the water any sort of metric of success," Theodore Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead at JPL, told Space.com in March 2023. 

Because of the distance between Mars and Earth, remote piloting is impossible, so Ingenuity flies pre-programmed flight paths. 

Ingenuity has become somewhat of a scout for Perseverance, helping identify locations of interest for the rover on its mission to seek out signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.

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Aside from posing for Ingenuity's aerial photos, Perseverance has been busy collecting soil and rock samples that will one day be returned to Earth via the ambitious Mars Sample Return mission. 

That campaign, a joint venture between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), will likewise send helicopters to Mars to retrieve the samples Perseverance has been stashing away in a sample depot if need be. (The baseline plan is for Perseverance to deliver its sample tubes to a rocket-toting lander itself; the helicopters will do this work if the rover isn't up to the task.)

An ESA-built Earth Return Orbiter will finally send the samples back to Earth for a landing in the Utah desert in 2033, according to current plans.

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Brett Tingley
Brett Tingley
Managing Editor, Space.com

Brett is curious about emerging aerospace technologies, alternative launch concepts, military space developments and uncrewed aircraft systems. Brett's work has appeared on Scientific American, The War Zone, Popular Science, the History Channel, Science Discovery and more. Brett has English degrees from Clemson University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In his free time, Brett enjoys skywatching throughout the dark skies of the Appalachian mountains.

9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • joshuawestman
    Admin said:
    The Mars helicopter Ingenuity captured an incredible aerial photo of the Perseverance rover amidst the desolate Red Planet plains on April 22, 2023.

    Mars helicopter Ingenuity snaps incredible aerial photo of Perseverance rover during 51st flight : Read more
    This is truly awe inspiring! To be able to take aerial photography on a distant world with such clarity is mind blowing. Something strikes me as odd however. Going up as a child in the 80's Mars was always depicted as a planet with a red sky. This shows a very earthlike blue sky, almost as if we could walk around on the surface without much protection if any from the elements.
    Reply
  • Dave
    Impressive work by Ingenuity. Looking forward to the day we can see the beautiful valleys and volcanoes of Mars , not to mention stunning images from inside a lava tube. It would be simply breathtaking.
    Reply
  • ReuvenF
    Personally, all I can think is, how we spent probably tens of millions of dollars -- if not more -- to send machines to another planet, so they can take pictures of one another.
    How exactly does that advance the cause of pure science or justify the expense?
    Reply
  • Dave
    Human spaceflight and exploration justifies the expense much more then sending machines. We were meant to work hand in hand ( or robotic limb) with machines. Hopefully we can get an actual date of when we are landing on the moon, and when we truly are going to Mars. This is when the true science begins.
    Reply
  • batvettejohnny
    ReuvenF said:
    Personally, all I can think is, how we spent probably tens of millions of dollars -- if not more -- to send machines to another planet, so they can take pictures of one another.
    How exactly does that advance the cause of pure science or justify the expense?
    Yeah I used to think like that too then I was reminded of the dozens of huge objects that have impacted the earth, many of which caused mass extinction events like the dinosaurs demise. If a several mile wide asteroid hits the earth in 100 years, every human on the planet is gone. Its not inconveivable, in fact its not an if but a when. Wouldnt it be a good idea if we had a sustainable colony of humans on Mars so our legacy isnt forgotten? The value of such planning is incalculable. On the way to that goal, many technologies will be developed that we will adapt to our daily lives just like things that came from apollo.
    There are more tangible benefits to all this besides satisfying the curiosity of scientists and enriching govt contractors.
    Reply
  • batvettejohnny
    Dave said:
    Human spaceflight and exploration justifies the expense much more then sending machines. We were meant to work hand in hand ( or robotic limb) with machines. Hopefully we can get an actual date of when we are landing on the moon, and when we truly are going to Mars. This is when the true science begins.
    A manned mars mission is extremely impractical if not completely impossible with the technology and propulsion systems known today. If you can even get a man to the red planet alive youd have to pour him out of the craft into a wheelbarrow. Its a 3+ year round trip, and while we can keep astronauts alive and in relative good health on the ISS for over a year, an interplanatary vehicle will have zero amenities.
    Because of the internet and smartphones technology is advancing at ever more rapid rates. Billions have the collective knowledge of humanity at their fingertips in seconds, and that ability has only been around for a decade. Many will build upon that knowledge so technology promises advancements at ever increasing speed.
    As much as they are a curse smartphones are probably humanity's greatest advancement to date, not because of themselves but because of the advancements they facilitate.
    Reply
  • Dave
    Impractical and impossible were words they used before we went to the moon. The late President Kennedy always reminds us "We do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
    There are other technologies they are working on. Alternate propulsion systems as well as artificial gravity. Even a fossil found on Mars would be worth the trip.
    Reply
  • batvettejohnny
    Dave said:
    Impractical and impossible were words they used before we went to the moon. The late President Kennedy always reminds us "We do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
    There are other technologies they are working on. Alternate propulsion systems as well as artificial gravity. Even a fossil found on Mars would be worth the trip.
    I get your point, however nothing about the then proposed apollo mission required anything outside of the known laws of physics at the time. Which still pretty much exist today. Similar to how the SR-71 was the fastest air breathing jet plane in the early 60s, and remains so today some 60 years later. They ran into a wall of physical laws that nothing could breach, aside from entirely new propulsion systems.
    I wasnt aware of "artificial gravity", I do know that centrifigual solutions are a myth. What was that Bruce Willis movie? LOL.
    Then theres the issue of shielding the crew in optimum conditions, are mass coronal ejections even survivable?
    Keeping humans alive on long missions in space adds so much of a burden in cost and complexity, its probably best we put that part aside until technology catches up.
    I hope we are beyond the silliness of doing it just to beat the enemy at it. I could be wrong...
    On another note I partly share Stephen Hawkings feelings on space exploration. That golden record on Voyager might look like a Dennys menu to the wrong species! We really have this naive notion that advanced civilizations are so much so that they would be past warfare and aggression and must want to help us. Think of humans coming across a field of cows or sheep. We use them as we needed with zero concern for their wishes. We should expect the same toward us.
    Reply
  • Dave
    Denny's menu? A twilight episode and pretty good one at that. Stephen Hawking was a brilliant man, but any intelligent lifeform capable of interstellar travel can get their resources from many different worlds without life. These lifeforms have most likely evolved past the need for social aggression. Humanity has not come together as one as a species and that makes us not only aggressive, but dangerous. We are a curious lot we humans and human exploration and spaceflight is critical to our understanding of the universe. We could not stop our progressive nature, even we tried.
    One day Mars will make an excellent base from which we can explore the outer planets.
    Reply