Morpheus Robot Flies As High As The Great Pyramid Before Deking Sideways And Touching Down

If it weren’t for that blue sky and those trees in behind, we’d be convinced that this little robot is landing on Mars. The Morpheus Lander once again proved how hard-core amazing these free flights are, as the automated robot soared 467 feet (142 meters) high Feb. 10 before jaunting sideways and making a bang-on-target landing.

“Today we went as high as the top of Great Pyramid of Giza,” the NASA Morpheus Lander Twitter feed said, adding that the team was enjoying “celebratory brownies” to mark the milestone. You can watch the whole video below (and we dare you not to gape during that sideways maneuver.)

The goal of Morpheus is to figure out landing technologies for other planets at a low cost, and lately the project has hit a series of literal highs as the robot made successful free flight after free flight. An earlier prototype crashed and burned in 2012, but the team implemented redesigns and has not lost a craft since.

On Feb. 14, Morpheus also completed a series of ground “hot fire” tests to gather data on how the engines are performing. On that day, the project’s Twitter feed assured followers that another free flight test would come “very soon.”

Elizabeth Howell

Elizabeth Howell is the senior writer at Universe Today. She also works for Space.com, Space Exploration Network, the NASA Lunar Science Institute, NASA Astrobiology Magazine and LiveScience, among others. Career highlights include watching three shuttle launches, and going on a two-week simulated Mars expedition in rural Utah. You can follow her on Twitter @howellspace or contact her at her website.

Recent Posts

Can Entangled Particles Communicate Faster than Light?

Entanglement is perhaps one of the most confusing aspects of quantum mechanics. On its surface,…

13 hours ago

IceCube Just Spent 10 Years Searching for Dark Matter

Neutrinos are tricky little blighters that are hard to observe. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory in…

22 hours ago

Star Devouring Black Hole Spotted by Astronomers

A team of astronomers have detected a surprisingly fast and bright burst of energy from…

1 day ago

What Makes Brown Dwarfs So Weird?

Meet the brown dwarf: bigger than a planet, and smaller than a star. A category…

2 days ago

Archaeology On Mars: Preserving Artifacts of Our Expansion Into the Solar System

In 1971, the Soviet Mars 3 lander became the first spacecraft to land on Mars,…

2 days ago

Building the Black Hole Family Tree

Many of the black holes astronomers observe are the result of mergers from less massive…

2 days ago