Mars Copter Of NASA Survives Anomaly During Its Sixth Flight

This unexpected motion is caused just by the image processing issues and this was the only thing that disrupted the flight’s plan. But there is nothing to worry about because the team is still working on the issue and trying hard so that it will live to fly on another day. Here is everything that happened.

The month has been a busy spring for many people but no one has forgotten NASA is flying a drone on another planet. As per the updates, the Ingenuity copter has finally completed its sixth flight. However, this one ran into some new issues and the issue is a timing problem. The timing problem with images received from its Navcam has made the helicopter collect down the incorrect information about where it was exactly flying.

Through a blog post, the team has described that various other subsystems of the copter kept it flying despite the anomaly, as it covered the last 65 meters of the journey and has landed safely as well. Apparently, the problem created was due to a glitch in a single image that removed the ability of the craft to read out the timings. The non-ability of read the time on pictures received from its navigation camera made this happen.  The team is presently working out to correct this issue, but this does not prove that the Ingenuity copter is in stable condition to fly itself even when something goes wrong.

The Ingenuity was able to survive this wild ride because it was all designed to tolerate the errors without getting any instability. Ingenuity’s team has also made a decision to stop relying on navigation camera images during chopper landing. NASA is now having the flight data and this data will be analysed carefully in the time ahead.