NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has had a tough few months, first shedding communication with its house planet and later struggling a glitch that interrupted its flight. However you’ll be able to’t hold a great chopper down. Ingenuity soared above the Martian terrain as soon as once more as its crew on Earth tries to determine what went flawed with its earlier flight.
The Mars helicopter briefly flew for a 25-second hop on August 3, logging in its 54th flight above the planet’s floor to offer information that might assist decide why its 53rd flight ended prematurely, NASA revealed this week.
Flight 53 came about on July 22—the primary flight to happen after NASA reestablished communication with Ingenuity following 63 days of silence. Ingenuity was purported to fly for 136 seconds, reaching an altitude of 16 ft (5 meters) above Mars’ floor earlier than descending vertically to eight ft (2.5 meters) to snap photos of a rocky outcrop and gather information for the Perseverance rover. The helicopter then climbed straight as much as 33 ft (10 meters), permitting its software program to establish areas that aren’t appropriate for touchdown, earlier than touching down on the floor of Mars.
Sadly, the helicopter’s 53rd flight didn’t go based on plan. As an alternative, Ingenuity flew for a complete of 74 seconds earlier than a flight contingency program known as “LAND_NOW” was triggered, inflicting the helicopter to robotically land. This system was “designed to place the helicopter on the floor as quickly as doable if anybody of some dozen off-nominal situations was encountered,” Teddy Tzanetos, crew lead emeritus for Ingenuity, stated in a press release.
The Ingenuity crew believes that the helicopter’s emergency touchdown was triggered when picture frames from the rotorcraft’s navigation digital camera didn’t sync up with information from its inertial measurement unit (which measures its acceleration and rotational charges), based on NASA.
The success of its subsequent flight, nonetheless, provides the crew confidence that the problem could be resolved by updating the flight software program to assist mitigate the impression of dropped photos. Ingenuity additionally snapped a photograph of its rover companion throughout its newest flight.
“Whereas we hoped to by no means set off a LAND_NOW, this flight is a helpful case examine that can profit future plane working on different worlds,” Tzanetos stated. “The crew 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 hold hovering forward on Mars.”
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