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
(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.