NASA Is Sending a Software Patch to Grounded Ingenuity Mars Helicopter
The Ingenuity Mars helicopter has been grounded due to the failure of a sensor, but NASA has a solution in the form of a software patch it's about to beam to the red planet.
As Håvard Grip, Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Chief Pilot at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains(Opens in a new window), Ingenuity was only designed for test flights during the warm Martian spring. We're now into Mars winter and extremely cold temperatures are causing a few problems for the little chopper.
At night, the temperature drops to minus 80 degrees Celsius (112 degrees Fahrenheit), and in order to survive, NASA shuts down the helicopter in order to minimize stress on the components it contains. However, preflight checks carried out during the warmer days revealed the inclinometer sensor has failed, which in turn means Ingenuity is grounded until a fix can be found.
The inclinometer contains two accelerometers used to measure gravity prior to the rotor spin-up and takeoff process. The sensor determines the orientation of the helicopter relative to the downward direction and is key to initializing the navigation algorithms before takeoff is allowed. Therefore, NASA can't initiate flight without it first finds an alternative way to take the measurement.
As we've seen countless times before, NASA is good at thinking outside the box and builds in some redundancy in case certain problems occur. This is one of those problems NASA predicted could happen, so it created a software patch for Ingenuity's flight computer. The patch allows the helicopter to take similar measurements to the inclinometer, but using the accelerometers contained in the inertial measurement unit (IMU).
Grip admits that the attitude estimates will be less accurate from the
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