NASA s Perseverance Captures Video, Audio of Fourth Ingenuity Flight
Sounds of the Mars Helicopter’s whirring rotors add another new dimension to the historic project.
For the first time, a spacecraft on another planet has recorded the sounds of a separate spacecraft. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used one of its two microphones to listen as the Ingenuity helicopter flew for the fourth time on April 30, 2021. A new video combines footage of the solar-powered helicopter taken by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z imager with audio from a microphone belonging to the rover’s SuperCam laser instrument.
The laser zaps rocks from a distance, studying their vapor with a spectrometer to reveal their chemical composition. The instrument’s microphone records the sounds of those laser strikes, which provide information on the physical properties of the targets, such as their relative hardness. The microphone can also record ambient noise, like the Martian wind.
April 19, 2021
The first flight of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was captured in this image from Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover on April 19, 2021. The milestone marked the first powered, controlled flight on another planet.
Flying in a controlled manner on Mars is far more difficult than flying on Earth. The Red Planet has significant gravity (about one-third that of Earth’s), but its atmosphere is just 1% as dense as Earth’s at the surface.
Stitched together from multiple images, the mosaic is not white balanced; instead, it is displayed in a preliminary calibrated version of a natural color composite, approximately simulating the colors of the scene that we would see if we were there viewing it ourselves.
NASA s Mars helicopter takes flight, 1st on another planet latimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from latimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Say Cheese on Mars: Perseverance’s Selfie With Ingenuity
NASA’s newest Mars rover used a camera on the end of its robotic arm to snap this shot of itself with the Ingenuity helicopter nearby.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took a selfie with the Ingenuity helicopter, seen here about 13 feet (4 meters) away in this image from April 6, 2021, the 46th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Perseverance captured the image using a camera called WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering), part of the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument, located at the end of the rover’s robotic arm.
NASA s Mars Helicopter Ingenuity s historic flight delayed foxnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from foxnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.