Farthest flight on Mars

On April 8, 2022 at 16:24 UTC, Ingenuity set several records with its 25th flight, traveling 704 meters across Jezero crater. Flying at its typical altitude of 10 meters, NASA's autonomous helicopter also set a new groundspeed record (5.5 meters per second, tied on June 1, 2022); and a new record for flight duration (161.3 seconds).

Its highest altitude gained within one flight was 12 meters, achieved during flights 10, 11, and 15, on 24 July, 4 August, and 6 November 2021.

It takes between 5 and 20 minutes for a radio signal to reach Mars from Earth, depending on where the two planets are in their orbits. This communications delay means that Ingenuity, which has to instantaneously react to flight conditions, has to be able to carry out its flights fully autonomously. In the days or weeks before it takes off, mission planners at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory send a series of waypoints and landmarks that define the route it must follow.

During flights a suite of instruments – which include a navigation camera, inertial measurement unit, and a laser range finder – feed information to Ingenuity’s flight computer. The design of Ingenuity's navigation system was made assuming it would only be making a few simple hops over relatively flat terrain near the Perseverance rover's landing site. Adapting this system to navigate the more complex terrain it has encountered on its travels with Perseverance has required some inventive workarounds, such as slowing its forward motion in areas where it is expected to struggle with landmark acquisition.