By Bill Galluccio
May 28, 2021
The helicopter on NASA s Mars rover Perseverance had a scare during its sixth test flight. The Ingenuity helicopter ran into problems shortly after taking off when a navigation error caused it to lose control while it was 33 feet off the ground.
Officials at NASA s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the issue occurred when a photo taken from an onboard camera failed to register in the craft s navigation system. That caused a chain reaction, as all subsequent images loaded into the system had an inaccurate time stamp. As a result, the helicopter began to tilt back and forth as much as 20 degrees because the navigation systems couldn t identify its location.
The MarsIngenuity Helicopter completed its sixth flight last Saturday – though with a slight hiccup.
In a blog post Thursday, NASA sSouthern California-basedJet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) detailed the events surrounding the in-flight anomaly.
Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Chief Pilot Håvard Grip explained that the goal of the mission was to expand the flight envelope and demonstrate aerial-imaging capabilities by taking stereo images of a region of interest to the west.
To do so, the rotorcraft climbed to an altitude of 33 feet before translating 492 southwest at a speed of 9 mph and again moving 49 feet south while taking images facing west.
It then flew another 164 feet northeast to land.
Ingenuity made its sixth flight on the Red Planet on May 22, NASA confirmed
It traveled up 33ft before moving 492ft southwest at about nine miles per hour
It travelled 49ft south while capturing images of a region of interest in the west
NASA says this second leg is where the system encountered stability issues
This was caused by one missing image from the navcam that the onboard AI uses to determine where the helicopter is, how high it is and how fast it is going