![]() Since it is so far from Earth and cannot be piloted by a human, Ingenuity is pre-programmed with certain parameters, and then it also makes key decisions by itself during the flight, using sensor and camera data. They had another idea-familiar to IT managers everywhere-in case it did not: reinstalling the flight software and rebooting. NASA identified a software issue-namely a problem with the aircraft's "watchdog timer" which alerts Ingenuity to potential problems and pauses its processes if it thinks it has detected an error.Įngineers made a coding tweak that allowed Ingenuity to overcome the problem and transition to "flight mode" correctly.īut the Ingenuity team, led by Burmese-American engineer MiMi Aung, were only 85 percent sure this solution would work. Ingenuity's first flight was planned for April 11, however, it was postponed after the chopper failed to successfully execute a planned high-speed spin-up test of the rotors on April 9. Temperatures at the Jezero Crater, just north of the equator, plunge to minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius), which would have cracked the chopper's exposed electronics. That was necessary so Ingenuity could run its internal heaters to survive in the chilling Martian night. Next, it had to be unlocked and deployed on the Martian surface while Perseverance drove away fast enough to ensure it didn't cast a shadow over Ingenuity that would have prevented the aircraft's solar panels charging up. Tucked under the belly of the Perseverance rover, Ingenuity's first goal was to withstand launch from Earth, the cruise through space, and landing on Mars. NASA is already preparing to send Dragonfly, a much larger rotorcraft-lander, to Saturn's icy moon Titan where it will fly multiple sorties in search of extraterrestrial life.ĭragonfly launches in 2026 and should reach its destination by 2034. It is hoped that one day, future aircraft can help revolutionize exploration of celestial bodies by going further and faster than rovers, and reaching areas hard to access by land. Previous technology demonstrations include the Mars Pathfinder rover, Sojourner, which was the first ever rover to explore another planet in 1997. Ingenuity is not gathering scientific data about Mars or aiding in the search for past microbial life. While it does have the capacity to fly for 90 seconds and cover a distance of up to 980 feet (300 meters), its test runs are intentionally of limited scope as they are meant to prove only that the technology works. The rotorcraft's first flight lasted 39.1 seconds as Ingenuity lifted itself to a height of 10 feet (three meters) and then returned to the Martian surface. Mike Wall is the author of " Out There " (Grand Central Publishing, 2018 illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. The rover has put 9.05 miles (14.57 km) on its odometer since touching down, according to mission team members. Perseverance is now beginning to climb up Jezero's ancient delta formation, to explore this different and intriguing environment. That rocket will blast the samples to Mars orbit, where a spacecraft will snag them and haul them back to Earth, perhaps as early as 2033 - a sample-return campaign that NASA will undertake with the European Space Agency. The 10 tubes in the Three Forks depot will be collected by Ingenuity-like helicopters late this decade if Perseverance isn't healthy enough to deliver its onboard samples to a rocket-toting lander itself. Perseverance recently finished setting up a backup sample cache in a patch of Jezero that the rover team calls Three Forks. Jezero is a great place to do such work, mission team members have said: The 28-mile-wide (45 km) crater hosted a big lake and a river delta billions of years ago. How NASA will launch Mars samples off the Red Planet ![]() Mars helicopter Ingenuity: First aircraft to fly on Red Planet Mars helicopter Ingenuity soars over Perseverance rover tracks on 41st flight
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