The Ingenuity helicopter has captured a unique bird’s-eye perspective of the gear that helped land the Perseverance rover on Mars.
During its one-year anniversary flight on April 19, the little Jet Propulsion Laboratory-built chopper took photos of the striped parachute used during Perseverance’s landing — often referred to as “7 minutes of terror” because it happens faster than radio signals can reach Earth from Mars — on February 18, 2021. It also spotted the cone-shaped backshell that helped protect the rover and Ingenuity on the trip from Earth to Mars and during its fiery, plunging descent to the Martian surface.
“NASA extended Ingenuity flight operations to perform pioneering flights such as this,” said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity’s team lead at JPL in Pasadena. Previously, we’ve only seen images of the discarded landing gear from a rover’s perspective, like an image taken by Perseverance showing the parachute and backshell from a distance. Aerial images, captured for the first time by Ingenuity from 26 feet in the air, provide more detail.
The backshell can be seen among a debris field it created after hitting the Martian surface while moving at about 78 miles per hour. But the backshell’s protective coating appears to be intact, as are the 80 suspension lines connecting it to the parachute. “To get the shots we needed, Ingenuity did a lot of maneuvering, but we were confident because there was complicated maneuvering on flights 10, 12, and 13,” said Håvard Grip, chief pilot of Ingenuity at JPL, in a statement. “Our landing spot set us up nicely to image an area of interest for the Perseverance science team on Flight 27, near ‘Séítah’ ridge.
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