NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter just completed its 54th flight after an abrupt landing during the previous journey. More specifically, Flight 53 was initially going to last 136-seconds, dedicated to collecting imagery of the planet’s surface, but a flight-contingency program was triggered after just 74-seconds.
As for Flight 54, it was a simple 25-second up-and-down hop to collect data that could potentially help the Ingenuity team determine why its 53rd flight ended early. From their early investigation, they believe the abrupt landing was triggered when image frames from the helicopter’s navigation camera did not sync up as expected with data from the rotorcraft’s inertial measurement unit.
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Since the very first flight we have included a program called ‘LAND_NOW’ that 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. During Flight 53, we encountered one of these, and the helicopter worked as planned and executed an immediate landing,” said Teddy Tzanetos, Team Lead emeritus for Ingenuity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
