Mars Helicopter Lands Safely After Serious In-Flight Anomaly

Ingenuity’s sixth flight on Mars took place this week, and we’ve just heard details from JPL on an “in-flight anomaly.” The little robotic helicopter did manage to land safely, more or less where it was aiming for, but the software glitch that it encountered sounds terrifying, with “roll and pitch excursions of more than 20 degrees, large control inputs, and spikes in power consumption.” Fortunately, JPL knows exactly what went wrong.

Flight six was an ambitious flight for Ingenuity. After ascending to 10 meters, the plan was for the helicopter to fly 150m to the southwest, translate 20m south while taking some color pictures, and then finish up by flying 50m northeast to land at a new airfield that it had never seen before. Total time in the air was expected to be 140 seconds, with a top speed of four meters per second. This flight was to be both a significant expansion of Ingenuity’s flight envelope, as well as a test of whether its color camera could be used to take aerial stereo images to generate three dimensional maps of the Martian surface. 

But right at the end of that first 150m leg of the flight (about 54 seconds after takeoff), something went wrong, causing Ingenuity to begin “adjusting its velocity and tilting back and forth in an oscillating pattern” with “roll and pitch excursions of more than 20 degrees, large control inputs, and spikes in power consumption,” according to Ingenuity Chief Pilot Håvard Grip. Ingenuity’s behavior was erratic for the remainder of the flight, but remarkably, it landed safely within just five meters of its target.

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