With this third flight in the history books, the Ingenuity Mars helicopter team is looking ahead to planning its fourth flight in a few days time. On its first flight, Ingenuity spent roughly 40 seconds off the ground, hovering just about three metres, while the second test went hire, closer to five metres, spending approximately one minute in the air.
The biggest difficulty in flying on the Red Planet is the extremely thin atmosphere, which has just one per cent of the density here on Earth, making it hard for the Ingenuity to get off the ground.
Also, the distance from Earth to Mars puts remote control out of question, as it takes radio waves over 16 minutes to cover the distance between the two planets. Instead, Ingenuity takes its commands from the Perseverance rover, the mission’s main robot.