Spaceflight Insider
Cullen Desforges
May 10th, 2021
The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter takes flight for a fifth time to move to another airfield ahead of the expected traverse path of the Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Last week, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter successfully took to the Martial skies, once again proving its capabilities as a fully-functioning aircraft by starting a new demonstration phase.
The helicopter took to the skies at 3:26 p.m. EDT (19:26 UTC, 12:33 p.m. local Martian time) May 7, 2021, with data relayed back to earth at around 7:30 p.m. EDT (23:30 UTC). While the first four flights of Ingenuity were experimental in nature, the fifth flight set out to prove Ingenuity as a functioning aircraft on another planet by taking a one-way trip.