Fears for Nasa’s Mars helicopter as sensor breaks in extreme Martian weather

A ROBOTIC helicopter on Mars has developed technical difficulties with a sensor used for orientating itself with the surface of the planet.

Ingenuity the helicopter landed on the red planet with the Perseverance rover in February 2021.

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When Ingenuity took its first flight on Mars to a height of about 10 feet, it achieved the first controlled and powered flight to take place on another planet.

In the years since Ingenuity has taken 28 flights on Mars and demonstrated that future planetary exploration could have a robust drone program.

The robot was designed for 90-second missions and has spent almost an hour in total flying over the Martian surface.

But a busted sensor that reads which way gravity is pulling has sidelined the mini-copter.

The broken sensor is called the inclinometer – it was damaged by the Martian weather tugging on the helicopter’s bandwidth.

Nasa says the inclinometer consumes data from three other navigational components and algorithms “initialize” this information in preparation for takeoff.

Nasa has dialed up a patch to circumvent the broken sensor and get the same information in a different way.

A software script will intercept the bad data from the broken inclinometer censors, and replace it with good data from the remaining functioning sensors.

“Anticipating that this situation could potentially arise, we prepared the required software patch prior to last year’s arrival on Mars and kept it on the shelf for this eventuality,” Ingenuity chief pilot Harvard Grip wrote in a blog.

We’ll know if it worked in a few Martian days, or sols.

“A nonworking navigation sensor sounds like a big deal — and it is — but it’s not necessarily an end to our flying at Mars.”

Nasa says that Ingenuity “is smart for a small robot” – the small aircraft has overcome technical adversity in the past.

Nasa’s fact sheet for the helicopter notes that Ingenuity is not the most essential bot on Mars.

“The project is solely a demonstration of technology; it is not designed to support the Mars2020/Perseverance mission, which is searching for signs of ancient life and collecting samples of rock and sediment in tubes for potential return to Earth by later missions.”

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