NASA Mars helicopter resumes flights after crash landing

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has had a rough few months, first losing communication with its home planet and then suffering a failure that disrupts its flight. But you can’t keep a good helicopter down. Ingenuity rose above the Martian terrain once more as her team on Earth tries to figure out what went wrong on her previous flight.

The Mars helicopter flew briefly for 25-second jump on August 3, recording its Flight 54 above the planet’s surface to provide data that could help determine why its Flight 53 ended prematurely, NASA revealed this week.

Flight 53 took place on July 22—the first flight that will take place after NASA restored communication with Ingenuity after 63 days of silence. Ingenuity was supposed to fly for 136 seconds, reaching an altitude of 5 meters (16 feet) above the surface of Mars before descending vertically to 2.5 meters (8 feet) to take images of a rocky outcrop and collect data for the Perseverance rover. The helicopter then went up in a straight line up to 33 feet (10 meters), which allows its software to identify areas that are not suitable for landing, before landing on the surface of Mars.

Unfortunately, Helicopter Flight 53 did not go as planned. Instead, Ingenuity flew for a total of 74 seconds before a flight contingency program called “LAND_NOW” activated, causing the helicopter to land automatically. The program was “designed to bring the helicopter to the surface as quickly as possible if any of a few dozen off-nominal scenarios were encountered,” Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity team leader emeritus, said in a statement.

The Ingenuity team believes the helicopter’s emergency landing was triggered when image frames from the helicopter’s navigation camera were out of sync with data from its inertial measurement unit (which measures its acceleration and rotation rates), according to The NASA.

However, the success of its subsequent flight gives the team confidence that the issue can be resolved by updating the flight software to help mitigate the impact of lost images. Ingenuity also took a photo of his rover companion during its last flight.

“While we had hoped to never trigger a LAND_NOW, this flight is a valuable case study that will benefit future aircraft operating on other worlds,” Tzanetos said. “The team is working to better understand what happened on Flight 53, and with the success of Flight 54, we are confident that our baby is ready to continue flying on Mars.”

For more space flights in your life, follow us on Twitter and check the Gizmodo dedicated spaceflight page.