Mars Helicopter Suffered Glitch During Flight, Forced Emergency Landing:
During its sixth flight across the desolate Martian surface earlier this month, NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter experienced a bit of a software glitch.
The tiny four pound rotorcraft "began adjusting its velocity and tilting back and forth in an oscillating pattern" according to an official update, just after covering just over 500 feet.
The event forced it to make an emergency landing some 16 feet away from the intended touchdown site.
[...] Ingenuity is capable of adjusting control inputs 500 times per second thanks to a sophisticated inertial measurement unit (IMU) that can track its accelerations and rotation rates.
In addition to this IMU, Ingenuity uses its navigation camera to see where it is going and where it currently is. Unfortunately, 54 seconds into its sixth flight, a glitch occurred in the pipeline of images taken by this navigation camera, as Grip explained.
"This glitch caused a single image to be lost, but more importantly, it resulted in all later navigation images being delivered with inaccurate timestamps," Grip wrote in the update. That means the helicopter was "operating on the basis of incorrect information about when the image was taken."
Also at c|net
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Never Say Never Again
NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity set for 7th Red Planet flight on Sunday:
NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity will take to the air again this weekend, if all goes according to plan.
Ingenuity's handlers are prepping the 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) chopper for its seventh Martian flight, which will take place no earlier than Sunday (June 6). The plan is to send Ingenuity to a new airfield, about 350 feet (105 meters) south of its current location on the floor of Jezero Crater.
"This will mark the second time the helicopter will land at an airfield that it did not survey from the air during a previous flight," NASA officials wrote in an update on Friday (June 4). "Instead, the Ingenuity team is relying on imagery collected by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that suggests this new base of operations is relatively flat and has few surface obstructions."
Data from the flight will be beamed home to Earth over the three days following the flight, they added.
Video:See the view on Mars from Ingenuity helicopter's fourth flight
Previously:
Surviving an In-Flight Anomaly: What Happened on Ingenuity's Sixth Flight
Mars Helicopter Suffered Glitch During Flight, Forced Emergency Landing
Mars Helicopter Flight Delayed to No Earlier than April 14
NASA's Ingenuity Helicopter Survives First Freezing Night on Mars
NASA's Mars Rover Drops Off Ingenuity Helicopter Ahead of Historic Flight
First Flight on Mars? Ingenuity Helicopter Preps for Takeoff
NASA Lays Out Plans for its First Flights on Mars
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @07:02AM
Runaway submission, through Fox News? Not reliable. Would not recommend. Fake nudes.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @08:56AM (2 children)
I just realized I sit here disappointed in our government, but so happy it no linger feels like unopposed fascism.
Let us all take a minute to be grateful that we have competent governence once more. Not the best, in fact quite a few disappointments, but hoo-ray the neo nazis are out. Will Republicans double down on the dime store dictator?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @10:04AM
Competent governance? Is that what you whisper to yourself at the gas pump?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @12:00PM
They already have. It took them five to days (after everyone called them out) to grudgingly tell Marjorie Taylor Greene to stop comparing wearing a paper mask to the holocaust. This is the party that continually backs Israel. Ben Shapiro even called out her crazy. Matt Gaetz wants to run for president but he will certainly be in jail by then. His kiddie diddling cohort ratted him out for a plea bargain. Trump is about to get smacked with a criminal investigation and watch him plead for DeSantis to protect him from extradition.
Turns out the swamp was the actual republican party.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @10:28AM
That's exactly what they'd say if they didn't want you to see that image. Was this picture taken when they flying so close to a Martian prison labor camp that you could make out the Apple logos?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday May 28 2021, @11:24AM (3 children)
Interesting bug - I wonder what it is about Mars that made it happen (or else surely it would have been found on earth).
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Friday May 28 2021, @12:03PM (2 children)
Autonomous flight isn't easy. Especially without GPS and only an IMU for guidance.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday May 28 2021, @01:51PM (1 child)
Sure, I just assume that they tested the thing to death on earth before launching to Mars.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday May 28 2021, @09:03PM
All the flight tests on Earth would have had to be in a low pressure tank to properly simulate the aerodynamics. Other tests were likely conducted in a lab environment. I think we can all see the implications of this: They never did end-to-end testing in an environment where the locals were subjecting it to electronic attack. Heck, they probably didn't even consider the possibility.
Alas, it's all too clear in retrospect...
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @02:01PM (3 children)
Reminds me of:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @04:00PM
goto 10
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Friday May 28 2021, @04:04PM (1 child)
It sounds like the time-stamp failure resulted in the introduction of additional delay in a feedback loop. That made the loop unstable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @05:03PM
woosh
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 28 2021, @04:08PM
aristarchus sub predates this by 6 hours, yet was posted second, or is this giving safe space the two arty, one country system you guys run with?