On Finding "The Edge Of The Envelope" -- Way Out On Mars -- With A Robotic Helicopter: A New NASA Podcast...

NASA has posted a new podcast, with one of the lead engineers for the 'copter at right. While designed for five to seven hops, it succeeded in making 71 of them. On fight 72, its guidance system likely mis-identified a very flat patch of fine grain sands. . . as sky, and tilted to one side, causing the rotors to impact and snap, on hitting the surface.

But as the engineer clearly indicates, this too is a success -- we learn more about the edge conditions -- in using cameras to fly copters in an atmosphere only one percent the density of Earth's. Here's a bit; do enjoy:

. . .The area of Mars that Ingenuity was flying over towards the end of her mission — which we’ve now affectionately called the place Valinor Hills for nerdy “Lord of the Rings” reasons — was some of the most featureless terrain that Ingenuity had ever experienced. Because of that, it’s kind of a great victory story for us in that we finally found the edge, right? The whole journey over the last three years is, if you imagine the envelope as a sphere, our flight envelope, we’ve been pushing on in every direction between velocity, how high we can fly above ground level, the automatic landing hazard avoidance. In each vector, we’ve been expanding our envelope, and we now found the edge.

That boundary had to do, we believe the leading theory here is, that it had to do with how featureless the terrain was. That’s important because the way Ingenuity flies is she has a downward looking camera, an altimeter, and a set of inertial sensors like an accelerometer and a gyroscope. Very similar to drones here on Earth. Even if you were to take a drone here on Earth, and you were to put it in a white, pure white room, it wouldn’t be able to visually orient itself and figure out from moment to moment where the features are moving in the field of view. And it uses that information to determine and close the loop of where it actually thinks it is in space.

So going back to Mars here, that terrain near Valinor Hills was very sandy, very fine in terms of the texture of the sand. There weren’t a lot of boulders sticking out. And we saw on the logs in flight 70 and in 71 that the number of features that the baby was able to resolve was dropping and going lower, and she was reporting, “Hey, guys, this is getting very challenging for me to, you know, navigate it.”

And there was no other path for us to go. We had to go to the northwest because that’s where the river was headed. So the best thing to do was to keep trying to tweak some parameters if we could, and learn as much as we could and, and we succeeded in that regard. Unfortunately, had the rough landing, we weren’t able to keep flying. But she surprised us still. . . .

Onward -- dare mighty things, indeed!

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