8/17/2023 0 Comments Software engineer nasaMeanwhile, Ingenuity has now logged 10 times as much flight time as it was originally built for, and some of the helicopter’s components are starting to wear out. And while we recently upgraded the navigation software onboard to help determine safe airfields, every flight is still a white-knuckler.” “We’re flying over the dried-up remnants of an ancient river that is filled with sand dunes, boulders, and rocks, and surrounded by hills that could have us for lunch. “We are not in Martian Kansas anymore,” said Josh Anderson, Ingenuity operations lead at JPL, in a statement. For one thing, the terrain Ingenuity and Perseverance are working their way across is uneven and not as well-mapped as the area around Wright Brothers Airfield, where Ingenuity made its first few flights. Things are only going to get harder for Ingenuity, and more nerve-wracking for its loyal crew of humans. It turned out that a rocky ridge had blocked radio signals between Ingenuity and Perseverance, and the rover’s body may actually have been blocking the antenna it uses to call Ingenuity. A couple of sols later - it was April 23 back here on Earth - the crew at JPL managed to send Ingenuity its instructions for Flight 50. So the Ingenuity team was relieved, to put it mildly, when the helicopter finally pinged out a faint reply to Perseverance’s radio calls. Ingenuity looks down at its own shadow during its first flight. It stops answering radio messages, and you may know exactly what happened, or you may have to wait for a satellite flyover to find the wreckage. The trouble with operating robots on Mars is that you’re 188 million miles away, and sometimes an $80 million space robot just disappears. But on the 755th sol (Martian day) of the mission, when the crew on Earth tried to send Ingenuity instructions for its milestone 50th flight, they heard only silence. Ingenuity had managed to snap its highest-altitude photograph yet, and it had finished a very successful science scouting flight a few days earlier. ![]() Left on ReadĪt NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ingenuity’s team of operators thought everything was fine when they downloaded the data from the Mars helicopter’s 49th flight on April 2. Ingenuity has done so, so well, but its human colleagues are in for more suspense and drama in the coming months. It’s now logged 51, and moved on from proving it could fly to scouting routes and science goals for the Perseverance Rover. The little helicopter was only supposed to make five flights - just enough to prove it was possible to fly in the thin air on Mars. The Mars helicopter’s chief engineer, Travis Brown, recently revealed details of the helicopter’s nerve-wracking week of silence in a blog post. Ingenuity marked its 50th flight with a late April Fool’s prank on its operators, going no-contact with them for almost a week in mid-April before finally responding just in the nick of time.
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