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: SpaceX identifies the mission as "Commercial GTO 1". Dror-1 is a geostationary communication satellite built and developed by Israel Aerospa…
A batch of 28 satellites for the Starlink mega-constellation - SpaceX's project for space-based Internet communication system.
Progress resupply mission to the International Space Station.
Satellite officially named for "space environment detection" purposes, exact details unknown.
A batch of 27 satellites for the Starlink mega-constellation - SpaceX's project for space-based Internet communication system.
Second of EUMETSAT's third generation of weather satellite.
NS-33 is the 13th crewed flight for the New Shepard program and the 33rd in its history.
A batch of 26 satellites for the Starlink mega-constellation - SpaceX's project for space-based Internet communication system.
GOSAT-GW (Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite Greenhouse gases and Water cycle), also known as Ibuki GW and formerly known as GOSAT 3, is JAXA's nex…
'Symphony In The Stars' is the first of two dedicated missions on Electron to deploy a single spacecraft to a 650km circular Earth orbit for a confid…