Ingenuity takes shortest flight in Martian aviation historical past

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NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter just lately accomplished a “brief however important” flight lasting a mere 18 seconds — 13 seconds shorter than its debut flight on the pink planet in April 2021.

Regardless of the transient nature of the flight, the success of the brief hover simply 16 ft off the bottom efficiently examined two new and vital capabilities for the helicopter: hazard avoidance when touchdown, and the usage of digital elevation maps to help navigation.

“Ingenuity was developed as a expertise demonstration and designed to function on Mars in flat, clean terrain,” Joshua Anderson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is overseeing the mission, defined in a submit in regards to the plane’s most up-to-date flight.

The JPL workforce member stated that as Ingenuity continued its explorations of Jezero Crater alongside NASA’s Perseverance rover, each autos encountered more and more difficult terrain past what the workforce had been anticipating.

The brand new hazard-avoidance software program allows the helicopter to make use of its downward-facing navigation digicam to establish the most secure seen touchdown website, permitting it to securely land amongst rockier terrain than earlier than, which implies extra potential touchdown websites for the diminutive drone-like machine.

“In prior flights, Ingenuity’s pilots have wanted to search out airfields freed from any rocks or different obstacles that might probably harm the car when touchdown,” Anderson stated. “Jezero Crater is a rocky place, so protected airfields have been powerful to search out.”

The digital elevation maps may also assist to eradicate an issue wherein hilly terrain causes veering points for the helicopter as its navigation software program had solely been designed to deal with flat terrain.

“This new software program replace corrects this flat-ground assumption through the use of digital elevation maps of Jezero Crater to assist the navigation software program distinguish between adjustments in terrain and car motion,” Anderson stated. “This will increase Ingenuity’s accuracy, permitting the pilots to focus on smaller airfields going ahead.”

The workforce will now use the outcomes from Ingenuity’s brief and easy flight to start extra superior testing of the brand new capabilities to verify they’re working as designed.

Anderson stated the replace makes the plane “a much more succesful car and efficient scout for Perseverance,” including: “We’re all excited to see the place this replace will enable us to take Ingenuity’s journey subsequent.”

Ingenuity’s shortest flight befell on November 23 and was the plane’s thirty fourth to this point. Its longest flight to date lasted 169.5 seconds throughout a mission in August 2021.

The helicopter has been serving to to search out protected routes for the ground-based Perseverance rover, which is spending its time looking for proof of historic life on the distant planet, in addition to testing new applied sciences for future human missions to Mars.