{"id":11650,"date":"2021-05-27T23:12:04","date_gmt":"2021-05-27T15:12:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/mars-helicopter-muscles-through-navigation-glitch-on-sixth-flight\/"},"modified":"2021-05-27T23:12:04","modified_gmt":"2021-05-27T15:12:04","slug":"mars-helicopter-muscles-through-navigation-glitch-on-sixth-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/mars-helicopter-muscles-through-navigation-glitch-on-sixth-flight\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars helicopter \u2018muscles through\u2019 navigation glitch on sixth flight"},"content":{"rendered":"
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One of the cameras on the Perseverance rover\u2019s Mastcam-Z instrument took this picture of the Ingenuity helicopter April 9. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/ASU<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NASA\u2019s Ingenuity helicopter safely landed after wobbling, suffering power spikes, and enduring velocity fluctuations on its sixth flight at Mars, officials said Wednesday.<\/p>\n

The helicopter took off May 22 on its sixth automated flight and completed the first leg of a planned 705-foot (215-meter) excursion without a hitch. But Ingenuity started tilting back and forth in an oscillating pattern, encountering roll and pitch excursions of more than 20 degrees, registering large control inputs, and suffered spikes in power consumption, according to H\u00e5vard Grip, the helicopter\u2019s chief pilot at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.<\/p>\n

Ingenuity overcame the glitch, which engineers traced to part of the helicopter\u2019s navigation system. The helicopter limped through the rest of its flight and safely landed about 16 feet (5 meters) from its planned touchdown location, NASA said.<\/p>\n

The 1.6-foot-tall (49-centimeter) rotorcraft, delivered to Mars in February by NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover, accomplished the first flight in the atmosphere of another planet April 19. Since then, Ingenuity has flown four more times, reaching higher altitudes, traveling at higher speeds, and covering longer distances with each takeoff.<\/p>\n

NASA said a glitch in helicopter\u2019s navigation system caused Ingenuity to start swaying about 54 seconds into a planned 140-second flight last week.<\/p>\n

The helicopter navigates using an inertial measurement unit, which measures the craft\u2019s accelerations and rotational rates. The data helps Ingenuity determine where it is, how fast it is moving, and its orientation in flight. But the measurement unit is prone to errors over time.<\/p>\n

Ingenuity uses a down-facing navigation camera to track its flight path relative to features like rocks and sand ripples on the Martian surface. The camera takes pictures 30 times per second, and each picture comes with a timestamp for the helicopter\u2019s navigation system to compare series of images to estimate the rotorcraft\u2019s motion.<\/p>\n

\u201cApproximately 54 seconds into the flight, a glitch occurred in the pipeline of images being delivered by the navigation camera,\u201d Grip wrote in a post on NASA\u2019s website. \u201cThis glitch caused a single image to be lost, but more importantly, it resulted in all later navigation images being delivered with inaccurate timestamps.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom this point on, each time the navigation algorithm performed a correction based on a navigation image, it was operating on the basis of incorrect information about when the image was taken,\u201d Grip wrote. \u201cThe resulting inconsistencies significantly degraded the information used to fly the helicopter, leading to estimates being constantly \u2018corrected\u2019 to account for phantom errors. Large oscillations ensued.\u201d<\/p>\n

The video below, released by NASA, shows the final 29 seconds of the May 22 flight. The helicopter is designed to ignore navigation camera images during landing, and instead performs a straight-down descent back to the surface of Mars.<\/p>\n