NASA’s Mars Helicopter Is Doing Things It Was Never Meant To Do

NASA’s Mars Ingenuity helicopter just completed a flight that its handlers never expected it to take. The pint-sized aircraft is little more than a proof of concept, designed to demonstrate that powered flight is possible on the Red Planet while also revealing how aerial machines might be useful during future missions. During its most recent flight — the ninth trip it’s taken since arriving on Mars — it began conducting science, which is something it wasn’t even built for.

The Perseverance rover recently began its first science campaign in earnest. The rover is expected to travel long distances and investigate many of the interesting features within the Jezero crater where it touched down in late February. It got something of a late start to this phase of its life due to the testing of the Ingenuity helicopter, as Perseverance was tasked with observing the chopper’s earliest test flights. Now, both the rover and the helicopter are returning data that is valuable to ongoing Mars research.

As NASA explains on its website, Ingenuity was never designed to take its most recent trip. The ninth flight saw the helicopter travel over some seriously rough terrain. It crossed over areas where pieces of the Martian surface meet, similar to the plates that make up Earth’s own crust. These areas are of great interest to scientists because they believe some remnants of “an ancient subsurface habitat” may be hidden there, waiting to be discovered. NASA’s helicopter can’t touch down and sample those areas, as it has no true scientific instruments, but it can provide researchers with the best images they’ve seen so far.

No Rest For Ingenuity

The fact that Ingenuity was built for testing purposes only cannot be overstated. The helicopter’s first flight was a brief hover, and even if that’s all it managed to do before it died, it would have been worth the work that was put into it. It didn’t stop there, of course, and it followed up its maiden flight with many more, and each one challenged the hardware in new ways. It moved faster, traveled for longer distances, and navigated the Martian skies like a seasoned pro. Having already proved that a helicopter similar to Ingenuity would be a valuable scientific tool, and with the chopper still alive and well on Mars, NASA is pushing the envelope in ways nobody expected. None of this was easy, of course. In fact, because Ingenuity was only expected to perform its test flights on flat, largely featureless stretches of the Martian surface, investigating the “Raised Ridge” structures nearby required some serious adjustments.

The helicopter uses its downward-facing camera for navigation, and NASA programmed it to think that everything it sees below is flat. This is fine when the ground actually is flat, but when it’s made up of ridges and rocks and other uneven terrains it can confuse the helicopter’s onboard navigation system and potentially lead to a crash. To mitigate the chance of failure, the Ingenuity team ran simulations and then made adjustments, including tweaking the flight plan so that the helicopter slowed down when it passed over a dramatic dip which would have potentially caused an in-flight error. In the days to come, the helicopter will relay color images of the region it passed over, providing NASA scientists with their first-ever up-close look at features that could reveal what Mars was once like.

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