“It’s a serendipitous thing that we got that flight experience under our belt,” Balaram says. It put the helicopter through extremes of movement - “how aggressively you can move the joystick, if you will” - that the engineers would not have asked it to do on purpose, and did perfectly fine, he says. The anomaly was a blessing in disguise, Balaram says. Luckily, the helicopter touched down safely within five meters of its intended landing spot. In trying to correct what it perceived as errors, Ingenuity “went on a wild joyride,” Balaram says. That meant that the time stamps on all subsequent images were a little off. Less than a minute into the May 22 flight, a single image got lost on its way from Ingenuity’s cameras to its onboard computer. If the next image doesn’t match that prediction, the software corrects the helicopter’s position and velocity to match up better. The helicopter’s navigation software keeps track of the craft’s position by taking an image, reading the time stamp on that image and predicting what the camera should see next based on landmarks from previous photos that Ingenuity took. During its sixth flight on May 22, the helicopter’s navigation system suffered a glitch that made it roll and sway alarmingly. NASA’s Perseverance rover filmed the flight.Įarly on, Ingenuity tested its limits in a way that the flight team really didn’t plan for. During the helicopter’s 13th flight, on September 4, Ingenuity (indicated with the white circle in the video above) took pictures of a rocky outcrop from multiple angles. The Ingenuity craft is now flying over untested, rough Martian terrain. Here’s what Ingenuity has been up to on Mars. “It’s gotten into a good groove,” says Ingenuity’s original chief engineer Bob Balaram NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif. And Ingenuity is coping with changing seasons and navigating over rough terrain, two things that the flier wasn’t designed to do. It’s helping the Perseverance rover explore Jezero crater, near an ancient river delta that may hold signs of past Martian life ( SN: 2/17/21). The helicopter, which took its first flight on April 19, is breaking its own records for distance and speed ( SN: 4/19/21). NASA engineers built and tested the first self-powered aircraft to fly on another planet to answer a simple question: Could the helicopter fly at all? The goal was to take five flights in 30 Martian days or break the aircraft trying.īut more than 120 Martian days past that experiment window, Ingenuity is still flying and doing things no one ever expected. The Ingenuity Mars helicopter was never supposed to last this long.
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