Posted on 06/09/2022 8:05:59 AM PDT by BenLurkin
As temperatures decreased over the past several weeks, operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California began putting Ingenuity to sleep every night as a way of protecting its systems from the harsh conditions. Even so, extreme fluctuations between day and night temperatures have caused stress on Ingenuity's components, and recent diagnostics revealed a failure in the vehicle's inclinometer, one of its navigational sensors, mission team members announced in a status update(opens in new tab) on Monday (June 6).
The inclinometer is responsible for supplying Ingenuity's flight software with gravimetric data prior to takeoff. This data allows Ingenuity to determine its position relative to the downward pull of Mars' gravity and enables calculations of the vehicle's roll and pitch prior to takeoff, Ingenuity chief pilot Håvard Grip of JPL explained in the status update. Without this initial data, the vehicle's software cannot determine proper orientation for Ingenuity during flight. But Grip and his colleagues think a redundancy in the helicopter's sensor array may allow them to keep Ingenuity flying.
Redundancy is the name of the game for NASA engineers, even when it comes to technology demonstrators with short life expectancies such as Ingenuity. Mission team members had envisioned a possible inclinometer failure under a number of various hypothetical scenarios, so they were ready with a software patch to address the issue well before the rover/copter duo's arrival on Mars last year.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
True- makes sense.
Doesn’t need to be real time as in streaming “live” during the flight. It just needs to have a normal video frame rate so you have a good sense of motion. The video files could be downloaded to Earth at any time after the flight rather than streaming during the flight. That’s my nitpicky nerdy answer. If by real time you just mean normal looking full frame rate video, then yes I heartily agree :)
The thing is, video cameras can be tiny these days and the files aren’t even really that big especially when they’re compressed. So it seems to me that a video camera would have been a small or even negligible extra burden on the design yet would have had the huge benefit of giving us flight video of the surface of friggin Mars!
Elon Musk would not have skipped the video camera...
A commercial drone here on the blue planet, even a toy or hobby drone has an IMU just like that. Should be able to manage attitude with that given a reasonably level takeoff to set the inertial position in the first place.
What I don’t understand, and I haven’t yet read about it, is how on “earth” do lithium batteries give any useful output after being cooled to -112°F overnight? Mine are useless at 20° without pre-heating.
maybe if elon gets his way we will have starlink sats in mars orbit and have video!!!, not sure just what the lag time between mars and earth is..
There you go. A single point failure will do it every time!
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