NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has had a rough few months, first losing communication with its home planet and later suffering a glitch that interrupted its flight. But you can’t keep a good chopper down. Ingenuity soared above the Martian terrain once again as its team on Earth tries to figure out what went wrong with its previous flight.
The Mars helicopter briefly flew for a 25-second hop on August 3, logging in its 54th flight above the planet’s surface to provide data that could help determine why its 53rd flight ended prematurely, NASA revealed this week.
Flight 53 took place on July 22—the first flight to take place after NASA reestablished communication with Ingenuity following 63 days of silence. Ingenuity was supposed to fly for 136 seconds, reaching an altitude of 16 feet (5 meters) above Mars’ surface before descending vertically to 8 feet (2.5 meters) to snap images of a rocky outcrop and collect data for the Perseverance rover. The helicopter then climbed straight up to 33 feet (10 meters), allowing its software to identify areas that are not suitable for landing, before touching down on the surface of Mars.
Unfortunately, the helicopter’s 53rd flight did not go according to plan. Instead, Ingenuity flew for a total of 74 seconds before a flight contingency program called “LAND_NOW” was triggered, causing the helicopter to automatically land. The program was “designed to put the helicopter on the surface as soon as possible if any one of a few dozen off-nominal scenarios was encountered,” Teddy Tzanetos, team lead emeritus for Ingenuity, said in a statement.
The Ingenuity team believes that the helicopter’s emergency landing was triggered when image frames from the rotorcraft’s navigation camera didn’t sync up with data from its inertial measurement unit (which measures its acceleration and rotational rates), according to NASA.
The success of its subsequent flight, however, gives the team confidence that the issue can be resolved by updating the flight software to help mitigate the impact of dropped images. Ingenuity also snapped a photo of its rover companion during its latest flight.
“While we hoped to never trigger a LAND_NOW, this flight is a valuable case study that will benefit future aircraft operating on other worlds,” Tzanetos said. “The team is working to better understand what occurred in Flight 53, and with Flight 54’s success we’re confident that our baby is ready to keep soaring ahead on Mars.”
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