Ingenuity May Need Software Revamp / Update, On Mars

On its sixth flight, after 54 seconds of a slightly over one minute planned flight, the Ingenuity copter entered an early shutdown mode -- soft landing about 15 feet short of the aimed for down-range distance.

Here is the full download, from C|Net's reporting, overnight:

. . .Ingenuity is designed to take care of itself while in flight. According to NASA, it uses an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to track position, velocity and attitude (location, speed and orientation). This works in partnership with the rotorcraft's navigation camera, which feeds images into the system.

"Approximately 54 seconds into the flight, a glitch occurred in the pipeline of images being delivered by the navigation camera," said NASA. "This glitch caused a single image to be lost, but more importantly, it resulted in all later navigation images being delivered with inaccurate timestamps. . . ."

This in turn caused a wobble, in flight attitude, and the software gently set Ingenuity down. And so as I say in the headline above, NASA may need to build in a more fault-tolerant sub-routine -- for its next software release, to deal with any future losses of cam data. [Here is the official NASA blog entry on it all, as an update. . . saw this on Saturday the 29^th, though it is time-stamped the 27^th.]

NASA may just alternatively get used to variable hop lengths, as it is possible that the cold nights on Mars are degrading processor speeds -- effectively stacking unprocessed images in a cue -- and thus causing the ertors that early landed the chopper. The Octavia Butler landing field is relatively flat and open terrain, so the risk of being toppled by landing on a cliff outcropping, or larger boulder. . . is small.

Indeed, this was the maiden copter mission's purpose: to work out bugs, before any full sample retrieval mission is mounted. And so, like assessing whether a new or old relationship might be re-worked, it involves some trial and error. Onward. . . grinning.

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