Check out this animation showing NASA Ingenuity’s 9th flight [Video]

At the beginning of this month, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter made a daring flight that would trek over 600 meters, at speeds of up to 5 m/s for just under 3 minutes. A user created an animation of the Ingenuity’s flight so you can see it from any angle.

While here on Earth those stats of a flight might mean nothing, on Mars where human input is impossible, it’s extremely significant. This flight to date has been the fastest and longest (in time and distance) so far. Since flight 6, the once tech demo has begun flying operational missions, aiding in the exploration of NASA’s Perseverance Rover.

While we have seen some videos of Ingenuity from the Perseverance rover they have all been stationary shots of the first few flights. And for a while now Perseverance has been minding its own business working on exploring Jezero Crater, unable to stop and capture Ingenuity’s flights.

A user on Twitter took used photos from Ingenuity’s multitude of cameras and recreated its flight plan in Blender. The flight animation shows the entire 625-meter flight across Mar’s surface and then land at a different airfield. The full animation is also available on Sketchfab where you can view the entire flight animation from any angle you wish.

Here is a look back at the 9th Flight of #MarsHelicopter
It was the longest flight to date and took Ingenuity over a large dune-covered area called Séítah.
I reconstructed the flight path with photogrammetry from the helicopters NAV images and animated it in @Blender (2x speed) pic.twitter.com/BqZB2J6gsL

— Simeon Schmauß (@stim3on) July 25, 2021

Ingenuity took its 10th flight the other day, making a short flight around some ridges. While the flight was short, it marked the highest the helicopter has flown on Mars and the first flight with 8 different waypoints. We hope the animator looks at more big Ingenuity moments to create additional flight animations for us to watch.

Read More

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• Falcon Heavy selected by NASA to launch Europa Clipper mission previously tied to SLS
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