NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Transitions Into Stationary Testbed

April 19, 2024 by Maya Posch 23 Comments

On April 16th NASA announced the formal end to Ingenuity’s days as the first ever Martian helicopter, following its 72nd and final flight mission in January. This flight ended with a rough landing during which the helicopter’s blades got damaged and separated, leaving the plucky flying machine with its wings clipped. During the final meet-up of the Mars Helicopter Team there was cake, but none for Ingenuity as its latest data set was reviewed by the team from 304 million kilometers away. This data confirms the latest software patch allows it to work stand-alone as a data collection platform.

With these latest software changes, Ingenuity will wake up daily, activate its computers and perform a self-check of all its components before collecting sensor data and images. The main goal of this is to collect long-term performance data on the helicopter’s systems, with enough onboard memory to allow for measurements to be stored for around 20 years. This means that although the Perseverance rover will have to trundle on without its flying mission buddy, one day in the future another rover, helicopter or primate will presumably drop by to either communicate with Ingenuity if it’s still alive, or harvest its memory unit for data retrieval.

Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip.

Heating Mars On The Cheap

April 8, 2024 by Zoe Skyforest 78 Comments

Mars is fairly attractive as a potential future home for humanity. It’s solid, with firm land underfoot. It’s able to hang on to a little atmosphere, which is more than you can say about the moon. It’s even got a day/night cycle remarkably close to our own. The only problem is it’s too darn cold, and there’s not a lot of oxygen to breathe, either.

Terraforming is the concept of fixing problems like these on a planet-wide scale. Forget living in domes—let’s just make the whole thing habitable!

That’s a huge task, so much current work involves exploring just what we could achieve with today’s technology. In the case of Mars, [Casey Handmer] doesn’t have a plan to terraform the whole planet. But he does suggest we could potentially achieve significant warming of the Red Planet for $10 billion in just 10 years. Continue reading “Heating Mars On The Cheap” →

Hackaday Links: February 4, 2024

February 4, 2024 by Dan Maloney 20 Comments

Things may not have gone as planned last week for the flying cellphone on Mars, but just because Ingenuity‘s flying career is over doesn’t mean there’s no more work to do. NASA announced this week that it’s going to try a series of “wiggle” maneuvers on Ingenuity‘s rotors, in an attempt to get a better look at the damage to the blade tips and possibly get some clues as to what went wrong. The conjecture at the moment seems to be that a large area of relatively featureless terrain confused the navigation system, which uses down-facing cameras to track terrain features. If the navigation program couldn’t get a bead on exactly how far above the ground it was, it’s possible the copter came in too hard and caused the rotor tips to dig into the regolith. There seems to be some photographic suggestion of that, with what looks like divots in the ground about where you’d expect the rotor tips to dig in, and even scraps of material that look out of place and seem to be about the same color as the rotor blades. All this remains to be seen, of course, and we’re sure that NASA and JPL are poring over all available data to piece together what happened. As much as we hate to say goodbye to Ingenuity, we eagerly await the post-mortem.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: February 4, 2024” →

Ingenuity May Be Grounded, But Its Legacy Will Be Grand

January 30, 2024 by Donald Papp 11 Comments

[Eric Berger] has a thoughtful and detailed article explaining why Ingenuity, NASA’s small helicopter on Mars, was probably far more revolutionary than many realize, and has a legacy to grant the future of off-world exploration that is already being felt.

Ingenuity was recently grounded due to rotor damage, having already performed far beyond the scope of its original mission. The damage, visible by way of a shadow from one of the rotors, might not look like much at first glance, but flying in the vanishingly-thin atmosphere of Mars requires the 1.18 meter (3.9 foot) carbon fiber blades to spin at very high speeds — meaning even minor rotor damage could be devastating.

Perseverance and Ingenuity pose for a selfie on Mars.

[Eric] points out a lot that is deeply interesting and influential about Ingenuity. Not only is successful powered flight on another planet a real Wright brothers moment, but how Ingenuity came to be validates a profoundly different engineering approach for NASA.

To work in the space industry is to be constrained by mass. But even so, Ingenuity‘s creators had a mere four pounds to work with. That’s for rotors, hardware, electronics, batteries, solar panel — all of it. NASA’s lightest computer module alone weighed a pound, so engineers had no choice but to depart from the usual NASA way of doing things to get it done at all. Not everyone at NASA was on board. But Ingenuity worked, and it worked wonderfully.

Powered flight opens new doors, and not just for support roles like navigation planning. There’s real science that can be done if powered flight is on the table. For example, [Eric] points out that inaccessible terrain such as the Valles Marineris canyon on Mars is doubtlessly scientifically fascinating, but at 4,000 km long and up to 7 km deep, rover-based exploration is not an option.

So Long And Thanks For All The Flights: Ingenuity Permanently Grounded After 72 Flights

January 25, 2024 by Dan Maloney 43 Comments

Just a few hours ago, NASA dropped some devastating news: Ingenuity will fly no more. Three years after dropping from the belly of the Perseverance rover and after 72 flights through the thin Martian atmosphere, the little helicopter that could now can’t, after having sustained damage to one or more of its rotors during its final landing.

Shadow of *Ingenuity*‘s rotor blade, showing damage suffered during a rough landing.

NASA’s terminal diagnosis of Ingenuity comes from a photo from one of the helicopter’s cameras, which shows a chunk missing from the tip of one of its rotors, likely caused by a rough landing after transiting a flat, sandy area that may have confused the aircraft’s navigational cameras.

While this is anything but good news, it’s not at all unexpected and in a way long overdue. Ingenuity was designed for a primary mission of just five flights, which it accomplished all the way back in May of 2021. There was heavy speculation at the time that Ingenuity might not even do that; we can recall one of the team members suggesting the odds were that Ingenuity’s tenure as the first controlled powered flying machine on another world would end as twisted wreckage in the newest, smallest crater on Mars.

But happily, Ingenuity proved the oddsmakers — and possibly those wishing to temper expectations — spectacularly wrong. In fact, by the fourth flight, it was clear that Ingenuity was in it for the long haul, enough so that NASA redefined its mission to “operational demonstration” and gave it another 30 sols of flight time. This gave the team the flight time needed to prove the helicopter’s worth as a scout for Perseverance and not just a distracting sideshow from the primary mission of searching for signs of ancient life on Mars.

Continue reading “So Long And Thanks For All The Flights: Ingenuity Permanently Grounded After 72 Flights” →

Ingenuity’s 62nd Flight And Attempting A New Speed Record

October 12, 2023 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

One of the fun aspects of exploring a new planet is that you can set a lot of new records, as is the case with the very first Mars-based helicopter, Ingenuity. Since its inaugural flight on April 19th of 2021, Ingenuity has flown 61 times, setting various records for distance traveled and other parameters. Although setting the first record is easy on account of anything being better than literally nothing, the real challenge lies in exceeding previously set records, as the team behind Ingenuity seeks to do again with flight 62 and a new speed record.

Targeting October 12th, the goal is to travel 268 meters (1.33 furlong) at a maximum altitude of 18 meters while hitting 10 meters per second (36 km/h), which would shatter the 8 m/s (28.8 km/h) set by flight 60. Although still quite a distance to the 240 m/s required to hit Mach 1 on Mars, the fact that this feat is being performed by a first-of-its-kind helicopter in the thin Martian atmosphere, using off-the-shelf components that were expected to last maybe a handful of flights, is nothing short of amazing.

(Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip!)

(Top image: Fourth flight of Ingenuity (circled), captured by Perseverance rover. Source: NASA/JPL)

Hackaday Links: August 20, 2023

August 20, 2023 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

In some ways, we’ve become a little jaded when it comes to news from Mars, which almost always has to do with the Ingenuity helicopter completing yet another successful flight. And so it was with the report of flight number 54 — almost. It turns out that the previous flight, which was conducted on July 22, suffered a glitch that cut the flight short by forcing an immediate landing. We had either completely missed that in the news, or NASA wasn’t forthcoming with the news, perhaps until they knew more. But the details of the error are interesting and appear related to a glitch that happened 46 flights before, way back in May of 2021, that involves dropped frames from the video coming from the helicopter’s down-facing navigational camera. When this first cropped up back on flight six, it was only a couple of missed frames that nearly crashed the craft, thanks to confusion between the video stream and the inertial data. Flight engineers updated the aircraft’s software to allow for a little more flexibility with dropped frames, which worked perfectly up until the aborted flight 53.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: August 20, 2023” →