The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity lifted off yet again on Thursday (Jan. 19), staying aloft for nearly 92 seconds on a sortie that covered about 5

Mars helicopter Ingenuity aces 40th Red Planet flight

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2023-01-23 13:00:10

The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity lifted off yet again on Thursday (Jan. 19), staying aloft for nearly 92 seconds on a sortie that covered about 584 feet (178 meters) of horizontal distance.

The flight repositioned Ingenuity, moving it from "Airfield Z" on the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater to "Airfield Beta," according to the mission's flight log (opens in new tab) . That journey took the little chopper over some sand dunes, as imagery captured during the hop shows.

Ingenuity landed with NASA's car-sized Perseverance Mars rover in February 2021 inside the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero, which hosted a big lake and a river delta billions of years ago.

Perseverance is searching for signs of past Mars life in the area and collecting dozens of samples that will be returned to Earth as early as 2033 by a joint NASA/European Space Agency campaign.

The plan calls for Perseverance to deliver those samples to a rocket-equipped NASA lander, which will launch the material to Mars orbit. Up there, the sample container will be grabbed by a European probe, which will haul it to Earth. These other spacecraft are scheduled to launch in the mid- to late 2020s.