When the Mars Ingenuity helicopter embarked on a round trip to the red planet, its engineers had a plan for five flights.
That’s not to say there weren’t more flights; in fact, it is normal for NASA spacecraft mission parameters to be set conservatively. But late last year, NASA extended the mission indefinitely, and the little helicopter it could now has surpassed its initial goals: it completed a 25-flight milestone in the thin, faint Martian atmosphere.
In fact, he completed 28 flights at the time of writing, but Flight 25 was an absolute block. On April 8, when the flight took place, Ingenuity broke both distance and speed records, rising to 704 meters (2,310 feet) and up to 5.5 meters per second (12 mph).
And he sent home images, which his managers have now put together in a video, showing the view of a robotic helicopter from a flight across Mars.
“For our record flight, the ingenuity downhill navigation camera gave us an impressive sense of what it would feel like to glide 33 feet above the surface of Mars at 12 miles per hour,” said the engineer and head of the ingenuity team, Teddy Tzanetos of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The flight time was 161.3 seconds, but the helicopter did not start taking pictures until about a second. This is because Ingenuity uses its camera for navigation; it does not light up until the helicopter reaches an altitude of approximately 1 meter, to prevent the camera from being confused by the dust raised on takeoff or landing.
In the video, Ingenuity climbs to an altitude of 33 meters before accelerating southwest. It reaches its top speed of 5.5 meters per second in three seconds. First, the helicopter flies over some undulating sand, then over rocky fields, followed by relatively flat, unpaved terrain, where Ingenuity could make a safe landing.
These flight parameters were pre-set and sent to Ingenuity by the ground helicopter pilot team. Once in the air (as it is), ingenuity is all alone; the delay between Earth and Mars means no corrections can be made halfway.
This means that there may be occasional setbacks, such as the one we saw a year ago, when a failure in the helicopter’s image processing channel caused a delay between what Ingenuity was seeing and where it was actually in. real time. Fortunately, the integrated security systems allowed Ingenuity to land safely so that NASA engineers could issue a patch before the next flight.
Since then, it has been a fairly smooth flight, even in atmospheric conditions very different from those here on Earth, and the small helicopter shows no sign of slowing down. The atmospheric volume of Mars is less than 1 percent of that of Earth; we are still amazed, with each flight, that humans were able to build something that could fly there. Wit, really!