After making history and completing two additional flights, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter could soon attempt even more ambitious forays into the skies of the Red Planet. On Friday, NASA announced it plans to transition the rotorcraft to an operational role once it completes its remaining test flights. NASA says those flights will involve more precise maneuvering, greater use of its photographic capabilities and, most of all, more significant risks. That’s a substantial change for a craft that was initially only supposed to show whether flying through the atmosphere of Mars was even possible.
The helicopter was scheduled to complete its fourth flight this week but had trouble lifting off on Thursday. As of early Friday afternoon, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said it was waiting on a data downlink from Mars to see whether its second attempt at flight four went off without any issues.
With Perseverance mostly scheduled to complete short drives over the next few weeks, NASA says it could send Ingenuity on short flights ahead of the rover to scout potential routes, find roadblocks and photograph the terrain ahead of it. NASA says those flights won’t be critical to the success of Perseverance’s mission, but they’ll provide “significant benefit” to future missions.
Ingenuity’s final flight will occur before the end of August. That way, NASA has enough time to do everything it plans to do with Perseverance before the end of the year, and the sun’s position between Earth and Mars makes communication between the two planets nearly impossible.
