Ingenuity’s flight plan for its next and 31st flight
The Ingenuity engineering team today released the flight plan for the helicopter’s next flight on Mars, its thirty-first since arrival.
The flight is scheduled for no earlier than September 6, mid-day on Mars, and will travel about one minute to the west for a distance of about 319 feet. The white dot on the overview map to the right shows the approximate landing spot, with the green dot marking Ingenuity’s present position. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present position as it moves to the south and west after leaving the first delta cliff face it studied during the past few months.
The flight’s main goal is to reposition the helicopter to keep it close to the rover to facilitate communications. However, the engineering team has also now adjusted its goals to also practice hitting very precise landing spots. This goal is to develop the engineering and software that can be used on the helicopter that is not yet built that NASA and ESA intend to use to recover Perseverance’s core samples for return to Earth. That helicopter will not only have to very precisely land right next to those samples in a position allowing it to grab them, it must also land very precisely next to the sample return spacecraft to deposit them within it.
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Soon there will be drones.
Useful for keeping our adversaries in their place.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an “All the Drones” we can afford kind-of-guy.
Our adversaries need to know to stay in their place.
Really.
I will not bow,or bend a knee.
I’m American..
Over the top, or not really.
Don’t care.
Tired of waiting for the rest of you to catch up.
Suspect one too many beers.
Not averse to self-deprecation.
“Tired of waiting for the rest of you to catch up.”
Oh, honey. As Americans, we’ve already been there.
It will be interesting to one day see drone-based surveys of the Martian landscape become the dominant form of Martian exploration. And it all started with the little Ingenuity.