NASA ’s Ingenuity has taken to the sky again but this flight , its sixth , was not the smooth sailing the Mars whirlybird hasexperienced previously . An unexpected job put the rotocopter at risk , causing it to lurch for a abbreviated wild ride , but it " muscle through it " grant to Ingenuity ’s main pilot , managing to land within 5 meter ( 16 foot ) of its intended landing place zona .
During the flight , cleverness ’s seafaring organization glitched and that conduct the helicopter to begin tilting back and forth towards the ending of its flight . The motion was quite spectacular with cycle of up to 20 degrees and spikes in big businessman consumption , which you’re able to see in the picture below .
“ more or less 54 second into the flight , a glitch occurred in the line of images being deliver by the navigation camera . This bug caused a exclusive image to be lose , but more importantly , it resulted in all later navigation image being delivered with inaccurate timestamps , ” Håvard Grip , inventiveness Mars Helicopter Chief Pilot , explained in ablog post .
This sequence of images – take on May 22 , 2021 , by the navigation camera aboard NASA ’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter – depicts the last 29 seconds of the rotorcraft ’s 6th escape . credit : NASA / JPL - Caltech
Images of the terrain are how Ingenuity sail around Mars . A missing ikon was more than just a spanner in the works , storm the onboard software program to seek to incessantly match what it was see with the incorrect variant of what it had seen before .
But the Mars whirlybird squad at NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory built a fomite that can resist the unexpected and no matter the risky journeying , inventiveness stay secure and still wildly successful .
“ We design Ingenuity to permit significant mistake without becoming fluid , including wrongdoing in timing . This built - in leeway was not fully take in Ingenuity ’s previous flight , because the fomite ’s behavior was in - family with our expectations , but this margin came to the rescue in Flight Six , ” Grip explained .
ingeniousness had been conceived as a technology demonstration to explore whether powered flight on another mankind was even possible , but it has been so successful that NASA promoted it to anoperational partnerof Perseverance , the roamer if fly to Mars with , to actively avail Perseverance explore and analyze Mars .
