Ingenuity took off at Wright Brothers Field – the same spot where the helicopter took off and touched back down on all the other flights – but it landed elsewhere, which is another first for the rotorcraft. Ingenuity climbed to 16 feet (5 meters), then retraced its course from flight four, heading south 423 feet (129 meters). But instead of turning around and heading back, it actually climbed to a new height record of 33 feet (10 meters), where it took some color (as well as black-and-white) images of the area. After a total flight time of about 110 seconds, Ingenuity landed, completing its first one-way trip.
Atop this ULA Atlas V rocket will be Perseverance, a car-sized rover which will explore an ancient river delta on Mars. Armed with a suite of six scientific instruments, Perseverance will primarily hunt for clues to the planet's distant past, and hopefully uncover signs of ancient life and habitability. The rover also carries an experiment that'll convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, a box-sized helicopter named Ingenuity that'll demonstrate powered flight on Mars, and a system that enables the rover to leave behind samples for later retrieval and return to Earth during NASA and ESA's ambitious sample return mission later this decade.
Heliocentric N/ANote: Payload identities uncertain. Batch of 16 Rassvet-3 Low Earth Orbit communication satellites for the Russian Byuro-1440 (Bureau 1440) conste…
Chinese commercial small satellites by Beijing-based company Future Navigation for providing GNSS augmentation signals services from LEO. They are pa…
A batch of 29 satellites for the Starlink mega-constellation - SpaceX's project for space-based Internet communication system.
Progress resupply mission to the International Space Station.
A batch of 25 satellites for the Starlink mega-constellation - SpaceX's project for space-based Internet communication system.
Synthetic aperture radar satellite for Japanese Earth imaging company Synspective.
A batch of 29 satellites for the Starlink mega-constellation - SpaceX's project for space-based Internet communication system.
A batch of 29 satellites for the Starlink mega-constellation - SpaceX's project for space-based Internet communication system.
A batch of 25 satellites for the Starlink mega-constellation - SpaceX's project for space-based Internet communication system.
Ride-share launch of 8 satellites to sun-synchronous orbit: * Juntian-1-04A * Dongpo-11 * Dongpo-12 * Dongpo-16 * Weitong-1-01 * Xiguang-1-06…