NASA's Ingenuity helicopter to attempt its SIXTH flight on Mars next week

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter is going to attempt a sixth flight on Mars next week, reaching speeds of up to nine miles per hour and flying for over two minutes. This will be the first flight as part of the'operations demonstration phase' that includes helping the Perseverance rover in its mission to find ancient signs of life. Ingenuity will scout multiple surface features from the air during its short flight, before landing in a different airfield to the one it takes off from for the first time. It will head up 33 feet into the Martian sky and then fly 492ft southwest at about nine miles per hour, taking photographs of rocks and dunes on the ground. In this new phase, data and images from the flight will be returned to Earth in the days following the flight, rather than in the following hours as with earlier trips. NASA's Ingenuity helicopter is going to attempt a sixth flight on Mars next week, reaching speeds of up to nine miles per hour and flying for over two minutes This will be the first flight as part of the'operations demonstration phase' that includes helping the Perseverance rover in its mission to find ancient signs of life Ingenuity was designed as a technology demonstrator rather than carrying any of its own science experiments or equipment.