Note: Only forum leaders may delete posts.
*HTML is ON *UBB Code is ON Smilies Legend
Smilies Legend
[b]SuperCam's RMI Spots Ingenuity's Broken Rotor [/b] The Remote Microscopic Imager (RMI) camera aboard NASA's Perseverance Mars rover took these zoomed-in images of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter and one of its rotor blades on Feb. 24, 2024, the 1,072nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The mosaic shows the helicopter at right, standing at an angle near the apex of a sand ripple. About 49 feet (15 meters) to the west of the helicopter's location (just left of center in the image), a large portion of one of the helicopter's rotor blades lies on the surface. The Ingenuity team is considering a theory that the blade detached after the rotorcraft impacted the Martian surface at the conclusion of the helicopter's 72nd and final flight on Jan. 18, 2024. This mosaic is made up of seven images taken by the RMI, which is part of the rover's SuperCam instrument. At the time these images were taken, the distance between the rover and helicopter was about 1,365 feet (415 meters). Each circular image has a field of view of 26 feet (7.8 meters) at this distance. Able to spot a softball from nearly a mile away, the RMI allows scientists to take images of details from a long distance. It also provides fine details of nearby targets zapped by SuperCam's laser. SuperCam is led by Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the instrument's body unit was developed. The mast unit, including the RMI used for these images, was developed and built by several laboratories of the CNRS (the French research center) and French universities under the contracting authority of Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES), the French space agency.
Contact Us | The Source for Space History & Artifacts
Copyright 1999-2025 collectSPACE. All rights reserved.