(Photo courtesy:
NASA/JPL)
NASA's Ingenuity
helicopter just failed to lift off from the Martian surface, but it will
try again on Friday
A software issue
may have prevented its flight computer from transitioning to flight mode.
Ingenuity has just
a week left for the two final flights that would push it to the limit.
NASA's Ingenuity
Mars helicopter was scheduled to embark on its most daring flight yet on
Thursday. But it failed to lift off, so NASA plans to try again on Friday.
Ingenuity made
history when it flew for the first time on April 19 - a 10-foot hover that
marked the first controlled, powered flight ever conducted on another planet.
Since then, the 4-pound drone has completed two more flights, venturing
farther and flying faster each time.
Ingenuity was in
good shape after its last flight, in which it traveled roughly 330 feet out
and back. It was set to attempt an even more ambitious adventure on
Thursday: a 117-second flight in which the little drone was supposed to
reach a record speed of 3.5 meters per second. The plan was for the
helicopter to climb 16 feet into the air, fly south for about 436 feet, and
snap photos of the Martian surface along the way. It was then supposed to
hover for more photos, turn around, and fly back to its original spot for
landing.
But Ingenuity's
rotor blades didn't lift it up at all.
The culprit is
probably a software issue that first showed up during a high-speed spin
test ahead of the chopper's first flight. That test failed because
Ingenuity's flight computer was unable to transition from
"preflight" to "flight" mode. Within a few days, NASA
engineers resolved the issue with a quick software rewrite.
But those
engineers determined that their fix would successfully transition the
helicopter into flight mode only 85% of the time. The data that Ingenuity
beamed back on Thursday indicated that it couldn't get into flight mode -
so it may have hit one of the 15% of instances in which the software patch
doesn't work.
"Today's
delay is in line with that expectation and does not prevent future
flights," NASA said.
The helicopter is
"safe and in good health," according to the agency, and it will
reattempt its fourth flight on Friday at 10:46 a.m. ET. NASA engineers
expect to receive the first data from that attempt about three hours later.
The Ingenuity team
has just one more week to complete two flights that would push the chopper
to its limits. By the fifth and final flight, Ingenuity's controllers plan
to push the helicopter as far and fast as it can go. In the process, they
expect Ingenuity to crash.
"We really
want to push the rotorcraft flights to the limit and really learn and get information
back from that," MiMi Aung, the project manager for Ingenuity, said in
a press briefing last week.
"That
information is extremely important," she added. "This is a
pathfinder. This is about, you know, finding if there any 'unknown
unknowns' that we can't model. And we really want to know what the limits
are. So we will be pushing the limits very deliberately."
Ingenuity's
flights are experimental, meant simply to test what rotorcraft technology
can do on Mars. So NASA expected that some of the attempts might fail. It's
all in the interest of gathering data to inform the development of
helicopter missions on other planets, which could do all kinds of science
and exploration that a rover mission can't.
"We are aware
that failure is more likely in this kind of scenario, and we're comfortable
with it because of the upside potential that success has," NASA
associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen told Insider.
Space helicopters
similar to Ingenuity could someday survey difficult terrain from above,
study large regions faster than a rover can, and even do reconnaissance for
astronauts.
Such space drones could
fly "over ravines, down canyons, up mountains," Josh Ravich, the
mechanical lead for the Ingenuity team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
told Insider. "Even rocky terrain is fairly inaccessible to the rovers
but much more easily accessed by a rotorcraft."
NASA already has
one helicopter mission in development: A rotorcraft called Dragonfly is set
to launch toward Saturn's moon Titan in 2027. It aims to investigate
whether that methane-rich world could host alien life.
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