English: Video footage from NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover provides a big-picture perspective of the 13th flight of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. The 160.5-second reconnaissance sortie involved flying into challenging terrain and taking images of a specific rocky outcrop from multiple angles.

Captured from a distance of about 980 feet (300 meters) by the rover’s two-camera Mastcam-Z, Ingenuity is barely discernible near the lower left of frame at the beginning of the video.

An annotated version of this video highlighting the location of Ingenuity can be found here.Video footage from the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover provides a big-picture perspective of the 13th flight of the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, on Sept. 4, 2021.

At 0:04 seconds into the video Ingenuity takes off and climbs to an altitude of to 26 feet (8 meters) before beginning its sideways translation to the right. At the video’s 0:59 second point, Ingenuity leaves the camera’s field of view on the right. Soon after (1:02), the helicopter returns into the field of view (the majority of frames that did not capture helicopter after it exited the camera’s field of view were purposely not downlinked from Mars by the team) and lands at a location near its takeoff point.

To obtain the footage, the “left eye” of the Mastcam-Z instrument is set for a wide-angle shot (26 mm focal length). The video is shot at 6 frames per second. Another view (available here) is taken at the same time by Mastcam-Z’s other (“right eye”) imager and provides a closer perspective of the helicopter as it took off and landed.

The Mastcam-Z investigation is led and operated by Arizona State University in Tempe, working in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California, on the design, fabrication, testing, and operation of the cameras, and in collaboration with the Neils Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen on the design, fabrication, and testing of the calibration targets.