Mars helicopter with problems on 6th flight

It is said that the Mars helicopter Ingenuity, which had been accumulating the number of flights smoothly, encountered a problem during the flight for the first time on its sixth flight held on May 22nd.

The flight plan for the day was to rise to a height of 10 m, then move 150 m to the southwest, 15 m to the south while photographing the west from here, and then fly 150 m to the northeast and land there.

In a report updated on May 27, Håvard Grip, chief pilot of Ingenuity at NASA JPL, said that an anomaly occurred after 54 seconds and that the search camera image was not input to the onboard computer. have. It is also said that all images were stamped with the wrong timestamp since they were filmed for the issue and lost one photo.

Since Ingenuity adopts a structure that calibrates the flight algorithm according to the image, the image timestamp reaches an outlier, the information for flying the helicopter is significantly degraded, and it will be an estimate for solving the error. A large vibration occurred in the aircraft.

According to him, vibration appeared as pitching and rolling more than 20 degrees during flight, resulting in a surge in power consumption. However, the helicopter overcame this anomaly and eventually landed safely at a distance of 5m from the planned landing point.

He didn’t intend it, but as a result, NASA was able to collect data from where the Mars helicopter was out of its performance realm. This data can be carefully analyzed in the future to increase the opportunity to accumulate know-how for helicopters flying to Mars.

Ingenuity, which arrived on Mars on February 18, separated from Perseverance on April 3 and conducted five flight tests. As the Ingenuity flight went smoothly, NASA decided to extend the mission and is conducting the flight as a direct reconnaissance. Related information can be found here.