The helicopter performed a short hop to help the team better understand why its previous flight was interrupted. NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter successfully completed its 54th flight on August 3. This was the first flight since the helicopter had to cut short its July 22 flight. The brief 25-s
This view of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was generated using data collected by the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard the agency’s Perseverance Mars rover on August 2, 2023, the 871st Martian day, or sol, of the mission, one day before the rotorcraft’s 54th flight. Credit: JPL/Caltech-ASU/MSSS
Flight 53 was planned as a 136-second scouting flight dedicated to collecting imagery of the planet’s surface for the Perseverance Mars rover science team. The complicated flight profile included flying north for 666 feet at an altitude of 16 feet and at a speed of 5.6 mph . The helicopter would then descend vertically to 8 feet to hover and capture images of a rocky outcrop.
The Ingenuity team is confident that the early landing was triggered when image frames from the helicopter’s navigation camera didn’t sync up as expected with data from the rotorcraft’s inertial measurement unit. The unit measures Ingenuity’s acceleration and rotational rates – data that makes it possible to estimate where the helicopter is, how fast it is moving, and how it is oriented in space.
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