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Ideas after Flight 53’s emergency landing. Credit: NASA/JPL-California Institute of Technology/ASU/MSSS
When it comes to publicly funded space exploration projects, the more information we have, the better. So we welcome NASA engineers to take time out of their busy schedules to provide an update on everyone’s favorite helicopter on Mars. Ingenuity has had a rough few months, and a new article has been published titled “.long waiting time”, an article posted on NASA’s website by Travis Brown, the Ingenuity project’s lead engineer, goes into quite a bit of detail about why.
The problems began when Ingenuity took off on April 26 with Flight 52. When the helicopter landed, it was out of range of Perseverance, her rover companions, and the helicopter’s radio link with controllers on Earth. Although this was intentional, it meant that Ingenuity’s management did not know whether the flight was a success or not.
Dr. Brown explains why the team intentionally chose to land the helicopter outside of perseverance range and details the four main mission priorities for the helicopter’s secondary mission. Naturally, the first priority is not to “ruin your patience.” The rover is currently collecting interesting samples for the now-endangered Mars Sample Return Mission, but assuming it still continues, those samples will eventually return to Earth. become.
Needless to say, if Ingenuity accidentally disrupts that process, NASA’s upper management would be upset. The helicopter pilots decided that the best thing for the helicopter to do was to stay well ahead of the rover and try to catch up to it, which is what Flight 52 attempted to do.
Unfortunately, part of Perseverance’s mission is flexibility, allowing its own project team to make decisions about where they want the rover to go next. After Ingenuity’s flight, the rover team decided not to stick to its planned route, which would take it close to the helicopter in the next few days, and instead decided to take a detour and do some exciting science elsewhere. When Perseverance returned to range, 61 days had passed as the helicopter patiently waited for it.
When Ingenuity was finally able to send back images, the science team was thrilled to find that it had landed on a group of pebbles never seen before on the Martian surface. Another flight was soon planned, this one intended to scout the nearby area for other interesting geological features that Perseverance could observe.
Then a second problem arose. During Ingenuity’s flight No. 53, an unprecedented error forced the helicopter to make an unexpected landing, which Dr. Brown explained using cameras tracking ground features and other sensors connected to the inertial guidance system. It is explained that the time between is asynchronous. Any engineer who has worked with multiple systems can tell you how difficult it is to synchronize timing, so the guidance system was right to shut down the system for the safety of the machine. Still, this means that Ingenuity is once again inactive, without achieving any potentially interesting mission objectives.
While Ingenuity recovered from its unexpected landing, Perseverance caught up with the helicopter and the rover’s superior instruments arrived at the station, eliminating the need to provide scientific data. Fortunately, this allowed the helicopter to take part in a brief Flight 54 flight to once again test the system, before returning to reconnaissance duty shortly thereafter on Flight 55, without the attendant synchronization problems. did not.
Recall that Ingenuity’s original mission plan spanned 30 days and three flights. It is currently in its 979th day and has completed a total of 66 flights. This is amazing for such a small machine on such a distant planet, and congratulations to Dr. Brown and his team. May they overcome more obstacles and complete more flights.
