Photo from the onboard camera "Ingenuity" before the flight number 20. Photo source: NASA.
On March 12, 2022, NASA announced that Ingenuity had made its third flight this year, and its twentieth-first flight in two years. The device continued to return to its first takeoff field, from where it launched in April 2021. The Martian helicopter during this mission covered a distance of 370 meters in 129.2 seconds. The helicopter landed in the northwest of the takeoff site on a new and thirteenth landing site for the entire time of its stay on Mars.
Flight #21 was the sixth in a series of flights that will see Ingenuity return to its very first takeoff site on Mars, called the Wright Brothers Field. The Perseverance rover will also arrive there. The devices will explore together the mouth of the Lake crater.
Currently, the Perseverance rover is performing its main scientific mission, collecting samples of Martian soil, and is located at a distance of several hundred meters from Ingenuity. Soon the distance between them will decrease as the rover heads towards the site of the first helicopter landings to explore some interesting, according to NASA, rocky formations of the Lake crater, previously photographed by Ingenuity from heights of 8-12 meters.
It is noteworthy that after 21 flights, Ingenuity covered almost the same distance in the planet's atmosphere that the Perseverance rover in scientific research mode traveled over the surface for the entire time - more than 4390 meters.
According to current statistics, Ingenuity was in operation on Mars ten times longer than the estimated time - 377 sols (Martian days), like the Perseverance rover, but 312 sols on the surface of the planet - autonomously. The helicopter was designed for 30 days of operation in Mars conditions after landing from the rover. It turned out that its capabilities allow you to fly longer. NASA extended the work of Ingenuity for 2022 in the mode of a reconnaissance probe to fix possible obstacles from the air and select the best paths for the rover.
"Ingenuity" for 21 missions flew a total of 4645 meters above the surface of Mars and spent 2330.38 seconds (more than 38 minutes) in flight mode in the planet's atmosphere. For all the flights, Ingenuity took several hundred color photographs and more than 3 thousand white photographs with the help of its cameras.
Ingenuity's hardware systems are based on the Snapdragon 801 SoC board. It runs Linux and open source software.
On April 19, Ingenuity made its first autonomous flight, and the rover made and sent a video of it to Earth.
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