NASA Video Charts Ingenuity’s 10-Mile Flight Path Around Mars https://petapixel.com/2024/04/23/nasa-video-charts-ingenuitys-10-mile-flight-path-around-mars/ #marsingenuityhelicopter #marsperseverancerover #marsingenuitydrone #ingenuity #flights #Space #mars #NASA

Goodbye Ingenuity, Perhaps We’ll Meet Again Someday https://petapixel.com/2024/02/07/goodbye-ingenuity-perhaps-well-meet-again-someday/ #marsingenuityhelicopter #marsperseverancerover #marsingenuitydrone #perseverance #ingenuity #Space #News #mars

After 3 Years, NASA’s Mars Camera Drone Has Made Its Final Flight https://petapixel.com/2024/01/26/after-3-years-nasas-mars-camera-drone-has-made-its-final-flight/ #marsingenuityhelicopter #marsperseverancerover #marsingenuitydrone #Technology #ingenuity #nasajpl #Space #News #mars #NASA

Watch NASA’s Mars Helicopter Set Another Flight Record

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NASA Ingenuity Helicopter Captures Spacecraft Wreckage on Mars

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NASA’s Perseverance Rover Shares its Top Mars Photos of 2021

The Mars Perseverance Rover has been hard at work on the Red Planet since it landed earlier this year. In addition to capturing physical samples, it has also been regularly snapping photos and NASA has shared its most liked images from the last year.

NASA hosts all the photos that the Mars rover captures and each can be liked by the public. NASA compiles these likes to determine a weekly favorite and has been doing so for the last 44 weeks.

As 2021 is coming to a close, the Perseverance Rover tweeted a short video that shows the top liked photo every week since it has been on Mars.

"My passion for rock collecting is matched only by my love of photography," the rover tweeted. "Thanks for voting on your favorite new images each week -- looking forward to many more to come!"

My passion for rock collecting is matched only by my love of photography. Thanks for voting on your favorite new images each week – looking forward to many more to come!

📷 View and “like” photos: <https://t.co/L6lhCNdqWq>
🗓 Image of the Week gallery: <https://t.co/jQbq9rXW53> pic.twitter.com/bwdGp5UxKq

-- NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) December 22, 2021

The photos range in subject matters and significance. While the first photo in the list might not seem particularly interesting, it is notable because it was the first photo Perseverance sent back to Earth after a successful Martian landing. Other popular photos include shots of the Ingenuity helicopter drone, wide photos of the Martian landscape, and close-ups of different rocks. Below are a few selects from the full gallary:

This photo was selected by public vote and featured as "Image of the Week" for Week 1 (Feb. 14 - 20, 2021) of the Perseverance rover mission on Mars. NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image of the area in front of it using its onboard Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera A.

This photo was selected by public vote and featured as "Image of the Week" for Week 16 (May 30 - June 5, 2021) of the Perseverance rover mission on Mars. NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its Left Mastcam-Z camera. Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras located high on the rover's mast.This photo was selected by public vote and featured as "Image of the Week" for Week 40 (Nov. 14 - 20, 2021) of the Perseverance rover mission on Mars. NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its Right Mastcam-Z camera. Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras located high on the rover's mast.

This photo was selected by public vote and featured as "Image of the Week" for Week 43 (Dec. 5 - 11, 2021) of the Perseverance rover mission on Mars. NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its Left Mastcam-Z camera. Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras located high on the rover's mast. This photo was selected by public vote and featured as "Image of the Week" for Week 11 (April 25 - May 1, 2021) of the Perseverance rover mission on Mars. NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its Left Mastcam-Z camera. Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras located high on the rover's mast. This photo was selected by public vote and featured as "Image of the Week" for Week 22 (July 11 - 17, 2021) of the Perseverance rover mission on Mars. NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its onboard Left Navigation Camera (Navcam). The camera is located high on the rover's mast and aids in driving. This photo was selected by public vote and featured as "Image of the Week" for Week 23 (July 18 - 24, 2021) of the Perseverance rover mission on Mars. NASA's Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its onboard Left Navigation Camera (Navcam). The camera is located high on the rover's mast and aids in driving.

The camera system on the Perseverance rover, which consists of 23 separate imaging systems, is nothing short of incredible. The cameras on NASA's latest rover are significantly better than the ones on the previous Curiosity rover in several ways: they can take color images, they have a wider field of view, and they have more resolution. In total, these three aspects greatly improve the quality of images taken by even the rover’s engineering cameras.

For more information on the Mars Perseverance Rover's camera systems, make sure to read PetaPixel 's previous coverage.

Image credits: All photos courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU.

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NASA Shows How the Mars Perseverance Rover Took its First Selfie

Back in April, the Mars Perseverance rover shared a selfie that included the Ingenuity helicopter drone on the surface of the Red Planet. The space agency has now shared a video and detailed explanation of how that photo was taken, including the fact it is made up of 62 individual images.

NASA explains that the point of the selfie isn't just to show off to folks back on Earth and perhaps inspire new generations of space enthusiasts, but actually is a way for the engineers to check wear and tear on the rover.

In the video clip above, the results of Perseverance’s robotic arm can be seen as it maneuvered to take the 62 images that compose the finished image. What it doesn’t capture is how much work went into making this first selfie happen. In a separate video below, Vandi Verma, Perseverance's Chief Engineer for Robotic Operations, explains.

<https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2021/06/TakingASelfieOnMars-1920.m4v>

"The way you and I might take a selfie is by holding a camera up with our arm and taking a single image," she says. "The way the rover takes a selfie is a little more complex than that."

The rover uses its' WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera that is positioned at the end of its robotic arm. The main purpose of this arm is to allow the rover to take close-up images of rocks for scientific analysis.

"Even with the arm fully extended, it can't cover the entire rover in a single image," Verma explains. "To capture the entire rover, we take multiple images and then stitch them together."

The image below shows a computer simulation of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover taking its first selfie. The point of view of the rover’s WATSON camera is included to show how each of the 62 images were taken. Those photos were later sent to Earth and stitched together into the selfie.

The team tries to hold the camera in the same position for each shot, and to do so it actually may mean that the arm has to move quite a lot.

"It can take up to an hour of arm motion and imaging to take that entire selfie," Verma says. "The reason you don't see the robotic arm in the selfie is that it is moving in between the different image frames that we are taking and we include enough overlap between the images so that when we stitch them together, we don't have to include the arm."

In the video clip above where Verma explains how the photo was taken, she also notes that for the first time, a Mars rover also has a microphone equipped, which allows them to share the sound of the rover moving its arm and taking each frame.

“The thing that took the most attention was getting Ingenuity into the right place in the selfie,” said Mike Ravine, Advanced Projects Manager at MSSS. “Given how small it is, I thought we did a pretty good job.”

Once the photos were compiled and sent back to Earth, image processing engineers began their work. They had to clean up any blemishes caused by dust that had settled on the camera, assemble the images into frames with a mosaic and smooth out their seams with software, and finally warp the crops so that it looks more like a normal camera that the public is used to seeing.

While a selfie on Earth is made by a single person, the Perseverance's selfie took an entire team of people and almost an entire week.

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NASA’s Mars Ingenuity Drone Almost Crashed Due to Camera Glitch

NASA's Mars Ingenuity drone survived a close call that could have ended in disaster. During its sixth flight, a glitch in its camera image delivery pipeline caused the drone's onboard navigation system to malfunction.

In order to explain what happened, it's crucial to first understand how the Ingenuity drone estimates its flight path and motion. While in the air, the drone keeps track of its motion by using an onboard inertial measurement unit (IMU) that measures Ingenuity's accelerations and rotational rates. Extrapolated, it's able to use this information to estimate where it is, how fast it is moving, and how it is oriented in space. NASA says that the onboard control system reacts to the estimated motions by adjusting control inputs at a rate of 500 times per second.

NASA also says that if the Ingenuity relied entirely on this system though, it would not be very accurate.

"Errors would quickly accumulate, and the helicopter would eventually lose its way," Håvard Grip, Ingenuity's Chief Pilot at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explains. "To maintain better accuracy over time, the IMU-based estimates are nominally corrected on a regular basis, and this is where Ingenuity’s navigation camera comes in."

During a majority of the time it is in the air, Ingenuity's downward-facing navigation cameras take 30 pictures a second of the surface and feeds that stream into the navigation computer.

This image of Mars was taken from the height of 33 feet (10 meters) by NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter during its sixth flight, on May 22, 2021. | Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

"Each time an image arrives, the navigation system’s algorithm performs a series of actions," Grip details. "First, it examines the timestamp that it receives together with the image in order to determine when the image was taken. Then, the algorithm makes a prediction about what the camera should have been seeing at that particular point in time, in terms of surface features that it can recognize from previous images taken moments before (typically due to color variations and protuberances like rocks and sand ripples). Finally, the algorithm looks at where those features actually appear in the image. The navigation algorithm uses the difference between the predicted and actual locations of these features to correct its estimates of position, velocity, and attitude."

It's this pipeline of images that suffered a glitch that put the entire system in jeopardy. About 54 seconds into the flight, that image pipeline suffered an error that caused it to drop a single photo from that 30 photos per second pipeline. While it lost that one photo, more importantly, that loss caused the ensuing photos to come in with an improper timestamp.

"From this point on, each time the navigation algorithm performed a correction based on a navigation image, it was operating on the basis of incorrect information about when the image was taken. The resulting inconsistencies significantly degraded the information used to fly the helicopter, leading to estimates being constantly “corrected” to account for phantom errors," Grip says. "Large oscillations ensued."

You can watch the last 29 seconds of the Ingenuity's flight in the clip below:

https://mars.nasa.gov/system/video_items/6021_PIA24598-IngenuityFlightSix.m4v

Luckily, despite this error, Ingenuity was able to safely touch down on the surface within 16 feet of its intended landing location. Grip says that one reason it was able to do so was because of the efforts the engineers of the drone's flight control team put into the programming. Ingenuity has ample "stability margin" that was designed to allow it to tolerate significant errors without crashing, which luckily included errors that would come as the result of poor timing.

Additionally, Grip says that the decision to stop using the navigation camera images as part of the algorithm during the final phase of descent paid off. The team chose this design decision because they believed it would ensure a smooth and continuous set of estimates of the helicopter's motion during the landing phase. Because of this, the errors that were coming from the camera no longer affected the drone once it started its landing procedure.

This image of Ingenuity was taken on May 23, 2021 – the day after its sixth flight – by the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard the Perseverance Mars rover. | Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

"Ingenuity ignored the camera images in the final moments of flight, stopped oscillating, leveled its attitude, and touched down at the speed as designed," Grip says.

"Looking at the bigger picture, Flight Six ended with Ingenuity safely on the ground because a number of subsystems – the rotor system, the actuators, and the power system – responded to increased demands to keep the helicopter flying. In a very real sense, Ingenuity muscled through the situation, and while the flight uncovered a timing vulnerability that will now have to be addressed, it also confirmed the robustness of the system in multiple ways," he concludes.

"While we did not intentionally plan such a stressful flight, NASA now has flight data probing the outer reaches of the helicopter’s performance envelope. That data will be carefully analyzed in the time ahead, expanding our reservoir of knowledge about flying helicopters on Mars."

Image credits: Header image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

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NASA Just Flew a Drone on Mars – Here is its First Photo

NASA's Ingenuity drone, which was transported to the Martian surface attached to the Perseverance Rover, has successfully taken flight and sent back its first photos while airborne. It is the first successful flight of a controlled, powered aircraft on another planet.

"We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet," said MiMi Aung, project manager for Ingenuity at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

"We've been talking for so long about our 'Wright Brothers moment' on Mars, and here it is."

The video above shows Ingenuity's carbon fiber blades as captured by the Mastcam-Z camera of the Perseverance Mars rover.

As reported by the BBC, confirmation of the drone's successful flight was transmitted via satellite which is orbiting Mars and relayed back to Earth.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

The black-and-white image above is the first sent back to Earth from Ingenuity and was captured with its navigation camera, which only takes lower-resolution black and white images. Additional color images taken from the drone are expected in the coming days.

The solar-powered helicopter first became airborne at 3:34 a.m. EDT (12:34 a.m. PDT) -- 12:33 Local Mean Solar Time (Mars time). This time was determined by the Ingenuity team as having the optimal energy and flight conditions for success. NASA writes that altimeter data indicates Ingenuity climbed to its prescribed maximum altitude of 10 feet (3 meters) and maintained a stable hover for 30 seconds. It then descended, touching back down on the surface of Mars after logging a total of 39.1 seconds of flight.

You wouldn’t believe what I just saw.

More images and video to come…#MarsHelicopterhttps://t.co/PLapgbHeZU pic.twitter.com/mbiOGx4tJZ

-- NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) April 19, 2021

Though the first flight of Ingenuity only lasted only seconds and the flight was not particularly high by Earth standards, the monumental achievement of flying a powered aircraft on another planet -- especially one with as thin of air and atmosphere as Mars -- cannot be understated.

The Red Planet has a significantly lower gravity – one-third that of Earth’s – and an extremely thin atmosphere with only 1% the pressure at the surface compared to our planet.

Ingenuity as photographed by the Perseverance Rover prior to its first flight. | NASA/JPL-Caltech

"This means there are relatively few air molecules with which Ingenuity’s two 4-foot-wide (1.2-meter-wide) rotor blades can interact to achieve flight," NASA writes. "The helicopter contains unique components, as well as off-the-shelf commercial parts -- many from the smartphone industry -- that were tested in deep space for the first time with this mission."

Fortune favors the bold. (But we still have a back-up plan.) #MarsHelicopter project manager MiMi Aung explains why the team is optimistic about the first flight attempt on Monday: https://t.co/cwCEcDvoQZ pic.twitter.com/CR4jQBGr2M

-- NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 18, 2021

NASA is expected to ask the drone to take part in more "adventurous" flights in the days ahead where it will be commanded to fly higher and farther as the engineers seek to test the limits of the technology.

“Ingenuity is the latest in a long and storied tradition of NASA projects achieving a space exploration goal once thought impossible,” said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk. “The X-15 was a pathfinder for the space shuttle. Mars Pathfinder and its Sojourner rover did the same for three generations of Mars rovers. We don’t know exactly where Ingenuity will lead us, but today’s results indicate the sky -- at least on Mars -- may not be the limit.”

NASA says that the 19.3-inch-tall (49-centimeter-tall) Ingenuity Mars Helicopter contains no science instruments inside its tissue-box-size fuselage. Instead, NASA says that the 4-pound (1.8-kg) rotorcraft is intended to demonstrate whether future exploration of the Red Planet could include an aerial perspective.

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover Takes Selfie with the Ingenuity Drone

While Curiosity recently shared the latest of several selfies it has captured over the years, NASA's Mars Perseverance rover was not to be outdone, and in its first-ever selfie, it decided to share the spotlight with the Ingenuity drone.

As Digital Trends reports, Perseverance took the selfie with the Ingenuity helicopter drone which is about 13 feet away from the body of the rover. Perseverance captured the picture by using one of its robotic arms. The picture was created from 62 images taken by Perseverance’s WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera on the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument, located at the end of the rover’s robotic arm. In this case, think of that long arm as a selfie stick.

Those 62 images were sent back to earch where NASA stiched them together into the finished images below. NASA says the images were taken in sequence while the rover was looking at the drone and then again while it was looking at the camera. The finished stiched images come together into these beautifully massive 112-megapixel photos:

To give an idea of how large the two photos are, NASA shared this up-close crop of the selfie that is 4180 x 2350 pixels in size, just a small portion of the giant 12,341 x 9,076 pixel full image. The full resolution files can be downloaded here.

In addition to the still frames above, NASA also put together a gif to show how the Perseverance rover's "head" moved back and forth between looking at Ingenuity and into the lens of the selfie camera.

Two bots, one selfie. Greetings from Jezero Crater, where I’ve taken my first selfie of the mission. I’m also watching the #MarsHelicopter Ingenuity as it gets ready for its first flight in a few days. Daring mighty things indeed.

Images: https://t.co/owLX2LaK52 pic.twitter.com/rTxDNK69rs

-- NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) April 7, 2021

If it is hard to picture how NASA's rovers take selfies, the organization has explained that in detail here as well as in the videos below.

These new selfie photos come after Perseverance successfully deployed Ingenuity from its position under the rover in advance of a test flight that is scheduled to take place early this month. Before this stage, Perseverance first had to drive to the "airfield" where Ingenuity would be dropped off so that it could charge its solar-powered battery.

Now that it has been deployed, it has 30 Martian days (31 Earth days) to conduct its test flights.

As can be imagined, flying a camera drone on Mars is no easy task. According to NASA, not only does the Red Planet have less gravity than Earth (about one-third the amount), the atmosphere is just 1% as dense. For more on what NASA is doing ahead of that monumental task, check out PetaPixel 's earlier coverage here.

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