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A photograph of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter taken by the Perseverance Rover on August 2. | Supply: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
NASA’s Mars Ingenuity Helicopter has accomplished its first flight since its unscheduled touchdown throughout its July 22 flight. The newest flight, Ingenuity’s 54th on the planet, was a 25-second up-and-down hop meant to offer the Ingenuity crew some perception on why the helicopter’s 53rd flight was minimize brief.
Flight 53, the one which Ingenuity needed to finish abruptly, was deliberate to be a 136-second scouting flight to gather photos of the Martian floor for the Perseverance rover science crew. The flight would come with flight north for 666 toes (203 meters) at an altitude of 16 toes (5 meters) at 5.6 mph (2.5 meters per second), the place it might hover and acquire imagery of a rocky outcrop.
After that, Ingenuity was purported to go straight up 33 toes (10 meters) to permit its hazard divert system to provoke. It could then descend vertically to the touch down.
In actuality, Ingenuity was solely capable of fly north for 466 toes earlier than its flight contingency program was triggered and the helicopter landed routinely after a complete flight time of 74 seconds.
“Because the very first flight we now have included a program referred to as ‘LAND_NOW’ that was designed to place the helicopter on the floor as quickly as doable if anyone of some dozen off-nominal situations was encountered,” stated Teddy Tzanetos, crew lead emeritus for Ingenuity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Throughout Flight 53, we encountered one in all these, and the helicopter labored as deliberate and executed a right away touchdown.”
The Ingenuity crew believes that this early touchdown was triggered by picture frames from the helicopter’s navigation digicam not syncing up accurately with information from Ingenuity’s inertial measurement unit, which measures its acceleration and rotational charges.
Information from the inertial measurement unit permits NASA to estimate the place the helicopter is, how briskly it’s shifting, and the way it’s oriented in house.
This similar downside occurred in the beginning of Ingenuity’s life on Mars on its sixth flight on Might 22, 2021. Ingenuity skilled extreme pitching and rolling throughout the flight as a result of a number of picture frames had been dropped.
After this incident, the Ingenuity crew up to date the helicopter’s flight software program to assist mitigate the influence of dropped photos, which labored, up till Flight 53. Throughout that flight, the variety of dropped navigation photos exceed what the sooner software program patch allowed.
“Whereas we hoped to by no means set off a LAND_NOW, this flight is a precious case research that may profit future plane working on different worlds,” stated Tzanetos. “The crew is working to higher perceive what occurred in Flight 53, and with Flight 54’s success we’re assured that our child is able to hold hovering forward on Mars.”
Ingenuity touched down on Mars in April 2021. The helicopter was the primary ever helicopter to be despatched to a different planet. It was despatched as a know-how demonstration to check the primary powered flight on Mars. Whereas the helicopter has been flying robust for over two years now, NASA’s crew doesn’t count on it to final eternally.
NASA has been so inspired by Ingenuity’s success that it determined to swap out its Pattern Fetch Rovers for 2 drones, much like the helicopter, to function backups to the Perseverance Rover within the Mars Pattern Return Marketing campaign.