Story at a glance
- NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was sent to the planet along with the Perseverance rover, which landed in February.
- After becoming the first powered flight on the Red Planet, the aircraft took five additional flights.
- During the most recent flight, an anomaly sent the helicopter spinning through the air.
About 150 meters into Ingenuity’s sixth flight, the helicopter started swinging back and forth after onboard sensors registered large control inputs and spikes in power consumption.
In a post, Håvard Grip, the chief pilot for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explained that a glitch interrupted the images being delivered by the navigation camera, introducing phantom errors that the spacecraft was attempting to correct. Despite the wild ride, Ingenuity managed to stay in the air and land safely on the surface within about 16 feet of the intended landing location.
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Just keep flying #MarsHelicopter completed its 6th flight. Despite unexpected motion from an image processing issue, Ingenuity muscled through the final ~65 meters of its 215-meter journey, landed safely & is ready to fly again. The chief pilot explains https://t.co/533hn7qixk pic.twitter.com/IHkkjXaHDd
— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) May 27, 2021
Ingenuity already made history as the first powered flight on the Red Planet last month and took four additional flights before the most recent one, one of which was rescheduled after an issue with the “watchdog” timer prevented the helicopter from shifting into flight mode.
“While we did not intentionally plan such a stressful flight, NASA now has flight data probing the outer reaches of the helicopter’s performance envelope. That data will be carefully analyzed in the time ahead, expanding our reservoir of knowledge about flying helicopters on Mars,” said Grip in the post.
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