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Mars

Perseverance Rover Captures Awesome Video of Helicopter Flying on Mars (gizmodo.com) 65

NASA has now released the most detailed footage yet of Ingenuity in flight. Gizmodo reports: The two videos were taken during the rotorcraft's 13th flight, which took place on September 4. The 16-second flight saw Ingenuity travel nearly 700 feet horizontally, at an altitude of 26 feet. The Perseverance rover recorded the rotorcraft's maneuvers using its two-camera Mastcam-Z, from a distance of about 1,000 feet away.

"The value of Mastcam-Z really shines through with these video clips," Justin Maki, deputy principal investigator for the Mastcam-Z instrument at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a NASA press release. "Even at 300 meters [984 feet] away, we get a magnificent closeup of takeoff and landing through Mastcam-Z's âright eye.' And while the helicopter is little more than a speck in the wide view taken through the 'left eye,' it gives viewers a good feel for the size of the environment that Ingenuity is exploring."

Recently, the scientists at NASA had to program Ingenuity to move a little faster, to compensate for the thinner atmosphere on Mars as the planet's seasons change. The helicopter's navigation system is automated and uses artificial intelligence to constantly measure and correct for environmental variables like wind speed and the level of the ground below it. "It's awesome to actually get to see this [automatic correction] occur," said Havard Grip, Ingenuity's chief pilot, in the same release. "It reinforces the accuracy of our modeling and our understanding of how to best operate Ingenuity."

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Perseverance Rover Captures Awesome Video of Helicopter Flying on Mars

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  • Impressive lifespan (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Åke Malmgren ( 3402337 ) on Saturday November 20, 2021 @07:31AM (#62004563)
    They thought it would be no way that it'd last this long. It runs on bog standard 18650 lithium cells (granted, they chose a type well suited for the purpose) and a consumer grade processor.
  • "Awesome video" (Score:4, Informative)

    by enriquevagu ( 1026480 ) on Saturday November 20, 2021 @07:36AM (#62004577)

    "Perseverance Rover Captures Poor-Quality Video of Awesome Helicopter Flying on Mars"

    FTFY. Even in the zoomed-in version it is difficult to identify the helicopter. Flying a helicopter on Mars can be considered "awesome", but not this video by itself.

  • ..a picture of a fossil, even a tiny tiny one, man, that would be so awesome. Flying an helicopter on Mars is pretty cool though.
    • sorry, title should have been: The day THEY show us... we should get an Edit function, for the first 1h
    • What fossils do you think a helicopter is going to find? Even on earth, where we know such things exist, that's not how you find fossils. On Mars, they are using drills and microscopes to look for traces of life, not fossils.
      • I was not thinking about the helicopter. They have cameras on board that could certainly picture fossils in the few mm size, if there are.
      • What fossils do you think a helicopter is going to find?

        You don't see the value in a helicopter to scout rock formations before they program the rover to trek to those formations? Also as an engineering test of what vehicles are possible on Mars, you do not see the value?

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