{"id":140272,"date":"2022-06-08T01:23:01","date_gmt":"2022-06-08T06:23:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/ingenuity-has-lost-its-sense-of-direction-but-itll-keep-on-flying"},"modified":"2022-06-08T01:23:01","modified_gmt":"2022-06-08T06:23:01","slug":"ingenuity-has-lost-its-sense-of-direction-but-itll-keep-on-flying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/ingenuity-has-lost-its-sense-of-direction-but-itll-keep-on-flying","title":{"rendered":"Ingenuity has Lost its Sense of Direction, but It\u2019ll Keep on Flying"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ingenuity-has-lost-its-sense-of-direction-but-itll-keep-on-flying2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Ingenuity chopper on Mars has lost an instrument that helps it navigate. Flight controllers have found a work-around.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Things are getting challenging for the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. The latest news from H\u00e5vard Grip, its chief pilot, is that the \u201cLittle Chopper that Could\u201d has lost its sense of direction thanks to a failed instrument. Never mind that it was designed to make only a few flights, mostly in Mars spring. Or that it\u2019s having a hard time staying warm now that winter is coming. Now, one of its navigation sensors, called an inclinometer, has stopped working. It\u2019s not the end of the world, though. \u201cA nonworking navigation sensor sounds like a big deal \u2013 and it is \u2013 but it\u2019s not necessarily an end to our flying at Mars,\u201d Grip wrote on the Mars Helicopter blog on June 6. It turns out that the controllers have options.<\/p>\n<p>Like other NASA planetary missions, Ingenuity sports a fair amount of redundancy in its systems. It has an inertial measurement unit (IMU) that measures accelerations and angular rates of ascent and descent in three directions. In addition, there\u2019s a laser rangefinder that measures the distance to the ground. Finally, the chopper has a navigation camera. It gives visual evidence of where Ingenuity is during flight or on the ground. An algorithm takes data from these instruments and uses it during flight. But, it needs to know the chopper\u2019s roll and pitch attitude, and that\u2019s what the inclinometer supplies.<\/p>\n<p>Since it failed, the team had to find a way to impersonate the inclinometer. So, they applied a software patch to the code running on Ingenuity\u2019s flight computer. It intercepts what Grip describes as \u201cgarbage packets\u201d of data and replaces them with good data. Essentially, the flight controllers tricked the copter\u2019s navigation algorithms into thinking that the data they have came from the inclinometer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Ingenuity chopper on Mars has lost an instrument that helps it navigate. Flight controllers have found a work-around. Things are getting challenging for the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. The latest news from H\u00e5vard Grip, its chief pilot, is that the \u201cLittle Chopper that Could\u201d has lost its sense of direction thanks to a failed [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":465,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,41,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-information-science","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/465"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}