Animation showing NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter flying onMars Credit: NASA
With Flight 15, Ingenuity started the journey back towards “Wright Brothers Field” at “Octavia E. Butler Landing,” the website where Perseverance touched down with Ingenuity inFebruary This flight was carried out with the recently-increased rotor speed of 2,700 rpm. After examining the information from Flight 15, the Ingenuity group is prepared to try our Flight 16 no earlier than Thursday, November 18.
Flight 16 will be a much shorter, 109- 2nd flight. Ingenuity will go up to 33 feet (10 meters), slide over the “Raised Ridges” at 3 miles per hour (1.5 meters per second), then land near the edge of “South Séítah,” covering a range of 380 feet (116 meters). We strategy to record a series of 9 color Return- to-Earth (RTE) electronic camera images equally spaced throughout the flight, oriented to the southwest and opposite the flight course.
Mars Helicopter Sol 254– Navigation Camera: NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter got this image utilizing its navigation electronic camera. This electronic camera is installed in the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed straight down to track the ground throughout flight. This image was gotten onNov 6, 2021 (Sol 254 of the Perseverance rover objective) at the regional mean solar time of 12: 06:00 This was the date of Ingenuity’s 15 th flight. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
If we could fly all the method throughout Séítah on Flight 9, why are we breaking the return course into several sections? As talked about in the Flight 9 retrospective post, the surface of Séítah is especially challenging for Ingenuity’s navigation algorithm. Because the navigation algorithm presumes flat surface, any modifications to the surface height presents heading mistake. On Flight 9, Ingenuity landed 154 feet (47 meters) far from the center of our 164- foot-(50- meter)- radius target airfield. The heading mistake on Flight 9 was less of an issue due to the fact that the surface of South Séítah was benign and enabled a big degree of unpredictability in our landed position. However, the surface on the north side of Séítah is rockier. As an outcome, we need to be more exact in our landing place on the return course. Flight 16 will deal with the challenging surface of the RaisedRidges By doing a brief flight over these ridges, we decrease collected heading mistake that can develop over longer flights.
Flight 16 will establish Ingenuity for a Séítah crossing on Flight 17, getting us closer to the present objective of Wright BrothersField While waiting on the Perseverance rover to capture up after Flight 17, the Ingenuity group is thinking about carrying out a flight software application upgrade to allow brand-new navigation abilities and much better prepare Ingenuity for future flights.
Written by Joshua Anderson, Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Tactical Lead at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
