NASA Ingenuity Helicopter Suffers From Vertigo On Mars After Sensor Failure

NASA engineers discovered a snag while preparing the Ingenuity helicopter for its next journey on Mars. One of the choppers' navigation sensors is broken.

The inclinometer is a sensor consisting of two accelerometers designed to monitor gravity before the helicopter starts its takeoff processes. This data is supplied into the navigation computer's algorithms by Ingenuity.

In other words, a conked-out inclinometer prevents the helicopter from orienting itself to the ground, a critical skill for a helicopter.

Gizmodo said that this is the first major technological setback Ingenuity has encountered since landing on Mars in February 2021.

Mars Ingenuity Helicopter Flies on Mars — NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter captured this shot as it hovered over the Martian surface on April 19, 2021, during the first instance of powered, controlled flight on another planet. It used its navigation camera, which autonomously tracks the ground during flight. NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA Ingenuity Helicopter Suffers From Sensor Failure

Håvard Grip, the project's lead helicopter pilot, detailed in a NASA blog post some of the obstacles the Ingenuity faces in the hostile environment and the fact that a sensor failure will need a computer patch.

The hostile atmosphere on Mars has presented difficulties for the little chopper and the team tasked with keeping it flying. To begin with, Grip claims that because the helicopter was not intended to live as long as it did, no precautions were made to guarantee that it could obtain adequate power from the sun during the short Martian winter days. As a result, Phys said the spacecraft must be turned off at night and should be exposed to temperatures as low as -80 degrees Celsius.

The continuous change in temperature extremes may also cause harm. Every vehicle transported to Mars, including the helicopter, must cope with continual dust, which is significantly more abundant in the winter.

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Despite the environment, Grip says that Ingenuity has held up very well. However, the inclinometer sensor has ceased operating. It is required to orient the helicopter before liftoff, even though it is not required for flight. Grip mentioned that the team behind Ingenuity considered this scenario and produced a patch to fix the problem before the chopper ever arrived on Mars.

The patch is designed to leverage data from other sensors to deceive the helicopter into believing it is receiving data from the inclinometer. He said the fix will be mailed out and deployed soon, and that Ingenuity should be back in the air soon.

How Spacecraft "Patch" Works

Before the spacecraft arrived on Mars, NASA engineers created a software patch that, if applied, would allow the onboard flight computer to use additional accelerometers contained in the separate inertial measurement unit (IMU) as a backup.

ZDNet said the patch's impact allows the IMU's sensors to sufficiently "impersonate" the inclinometer to estimate starting attitude.

The patch adds code to Ingenuity's flight computer software that intercepts "junk packets" from the malfunctioning sensor and replaces them with packets from IMU data. It's not how flight software should behave, but due to NASA's fix, it does in this circumstance.

The next step is installing the patch and finishing the commissioning process to check that the new software is working properly.

If everything goes well, NASA intends to complete uplinking and deploy the software patch over the following several sols, followed by commissioning procedures to check the new software is working properly.