Watch NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity explore intriguing Raised Ridges in new video

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Watch NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity make its most high-flying journey yet. 

In a brand-new video, you can watch Ingenuity make its highest and most complex flight to date, which took the autonomous craft over an area known as Raised Ridges. 

During this trip, its 10th flight, Ingenuity covered a distance of 310 feet (95 meters) and soared to a record altitude of 40 feet (12 meters). Combined with the distances traveled throughout all of its 10 flights, Ingenuity has now flown for more than one mile. 

This flight, completed on July 24, was the most complex of all Ingenuity flights, according to a NASA statement, and saw the helicopter perform multiple maneuvers while passing through 10 distinct waypoints.

Video: Watch Ingenuity explore intriguing Raised Ridges in new video
Related: Where to find the latest Mars photos from NASA's Perseverance rover

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter during its tenth and so far the most complex flight on July 24. (Image credit: NASA JPL)

As part of this flight, Ingenuity was sent to explore Raised Ridges, a rocky area in Jezero Crater south of the landing site of the agency's Perseverance rover, which carried Ingenuity to the Red Planet, landing on Feb. 18. The visuals obtained during the flight might help guide the rover in a future exploration of the Raised Ridges, which scientists find "intriguing," according to the NASA statement. 

Ingenuity, originally designed to perform only four flights, first lifted off in April. Since then, it has been gradually increasing the duration and complexity of its trips. This latest flight took 165.4 seconds, which is nearly as long as the craft's longest flight so far, its ninth flight on July 5, which lasted 166.5 seconds.

Ingenuity is now parked on its seventh Martian airfield as mission scientists continue to examine telemetry and images from the flight.

The Perseverance mission, designed to search for traces of life on the Red Planet and prepare samples of soil for a future return to Earth, lifted off Cape Canaveral exactly one year ago on July 30, 2020. 

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Tereza Pultarova
Tereza Pultarova
Senior Writer

Tereza is a London-based science and technology journalist, aspiring fiction writer and amateur gymnast. Originally from Prague, the Czech Republic, she spent the first seven years of her career working as a reporter, script-writer and presenter for various TV programmes of the Czech Public Service Television. She later took a career break to pursue further education and added a Master's in Science from the International Space University, France, to her Bachelor's in Journalism and Master's in Cultural Anthropology from Prague's Charles University. She worked as a reporter at the Engineering and Technology magazine, freelanced for a range of publications including Live Science, Space.com, Professional Engineering, Via Satellite and Space News and served as a maternity cover science editor at the European Space Agency.