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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 present the Ingenuity group 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 photographs of the Martian floor for the Perseverance rover science group. The flight would come with flight north for 666 ft (203 meters) at an altitude of 16 ft (5 meters) at 5.6 mph (2.5 meters per second), the place it will hover and acquire imagery of a rocky outcrop.
After that, Ingenuity was imagined to go straight up 33 ft (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 ft earlier than its flight contingency program was triggered and the helicopter landed mechanically after a complete flight time of 74 seconds.
“For the reason that very first flight now we have included a program known as ‘LAND_NOW’ that was designed to place the helicopter on the floor as quickly as attainable if anyone of some dozen off-nominal eventualities was encountered,” mentioned Teddy Tzanetos, group lead emeritus for Ingenuity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “Throughout Flight 53, we encountered certainly one of these, and the helicopter labored as deliberate and executed a direct touchdown.”
The Ingenuity group believes that this early touchdown was triggered by picture frames from the helicopter’s navigation digital camera not syncing up appropriately 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 identical downside occurred at the start of Ingenuity’s life on Mars on its sixth flight on Might 22, 2021. Ingenuity skilled extreme pitching and rolling through the flight as a result of a number of picture frames had been dropped.
After this incident, the Ingenuity group up to date the helicopter’s flight software program to assist mitigate the influence of dropped photographs, which labored, up till Flight 53. Throughout that flight, the variety of dropped navigation photographs exceed what the sooner software program patch allowed.
“Whereas we hoped to by no means set off a LAND_NOW, this flight is a helpful case research that can profit future plane working on different worlds,” mentioned Tzanetos. “The group is working to raised perceive what occurred in Flight 53, and with Flight 54’s success we’re assured that our child is able to preserve 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 group doesn’t count on it to final perpetually.
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.
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