Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2021

8 MAY-JUNE 2021 ASTRO PUBLISHING T his altimeter chart shows data from the first flight of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which occurred on April 19, 2021. [NASA/JPL-Caltech] N ASA’s Ingenuity helicopter can be seen here taking off, hovering and then landing on the Martian sur- face on April 19, 2021. The Mastcam-Z imager aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover shot video of the heli- copter’s flight. The video is presented here in side-by-side formats that have both been enhanced to show a dust plume swirling during takeoff and again on landing. The view on the left uses motion filtering to show where dust was detected during liftoff and landing and the view on the right is enhanced with the motion filtering. Scientists use this image processing to detect dust devils as they pass by Mars rovers. An additional version of the video includes a timer that counts down until liftoff and then counts up until landing. A ghostly “cut-out” of the helicopter is visible in each side- by-side format; that’s an artifact re- lated to the digital processing. [NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/SSI] At a maximum speed of 10 m/s, In- genuity’s ability to image the entire Opportunity journey and return to the rover’s starting position in under three hours would be limited only by the onboard power to complete the journey in a single flight. A con- siderable range of visual informa- tion between the short-range views of the rover cameras and the planet- scanning studies of the Mars Recon- naissance Orbiter can be filled in by drone, greatly improving both the internal path selection algorithms by