On Saturday, September 24, 2022, the Mars helicopter Ingenuity successfully completed its 33e flight above the ground of the Red Planet. But something caught the attention of the mission teams. A foreign object that has not yet been identified.
Ingenuity, the small helicopter taken to Mars by the Nasa Perseverance Rover, had departed for five test flights above the surface of the Red Planet. The first took place on April 19, 2021. A resounding success. Which was followed by many others. Until this Saturday, September 24, 2022, Ingenuity then flew to the… 33e time !
The flight took him to Sol 567, or 567e martian day Perseverance mission to Mars. Ingenuity rose up to 10 meters above the surface of Mars and covered, in some 55 seconds, more than 110 meters at a cruising speed of the order of 5 m/s. The objective of the day was simply to reposition the helicopter.
Investigations to understand
And what his navigation camera observed surprised the members of the team analyzing the data sent back by the Martian helicopter. A small piece of something unidentified, described by NASA as Foreign object debris (FOD), understand from « foreign object debris ». An object whose presence appears all the more strange to scientists and engineers as it did not appear on the images returned by Ingenuity during its previous flight.
The images show that the object, first hanging on one of the legs of the helicopter, ended up falling to the ground. However, the telemetry data from the flight and all the analyzes after the flight have so far not enabled the teams to locate any damage on Ingenuity. Investigations are still underway to try to understand.