Ingenious Software Patch to Raise Ingenuity 

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter—a small robotic helicopter operating on Mars— has been grounded due to the failure of an inclinometer. Subject device contains two accelerometers which measure gravitational forces prior to the vehicle’s rotor spin-up and takeoff process. 

Ingenuity’s navigation algorithms are predicated upon attitude data measured by the inclinometer. Ergo, the craft cannot fly until NASA devises alternate means by which to gauge attitude information.

Ingenuity was designed for flight during the warm Martian spring. The cold temperatures of the prevailing Martian winter are adversely affecting the vehicle’s systems. Nighttime temperatures on Mars drop to negative eighty-degrees Celsius (-112 degrees Fahrenheit). To protect Ingenuity’s components from cold, NASA shuts the vehicle down at night. 

Precautionary shut-downs notwithstanding, preflight checks carried out during the warmer, Martian days revealed the inclinometer had failed.

NASA, however, predicted the troubles Mars’s broad temperature variations would cause Ingenuity, and created a software patch for the helicopter’s flight computer. The patch allows the helicopter to utilize the accelerometers in its inertial measurement unit (IMU) to take measurements similar to those taken by the failed inclinometer.

Mr. Håvard Grip, Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Chief Pilot at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory concedes that the IMU attitude estimates will be less accurate, but good enough to allow a safe takeoff. 

Presently, NASA is establishing an uplink to Ingenuity, by which the software patch will be transmitted to Mars and installed. If all goes to plan, the helicopter—which is the first human-built, powered aircraft to take flight over a planet other than Earth—will soon return to operation.

Ingenuity bears a piece of fabric from the wing of the Wright Flyer, the airplane developed, built and flown by the Wright brothers in mankind’s first, heavier-than-air flight. Prior to Ingenuity, the Soviet Union’s Vega-1 spacecraft conducted an unpowered balloon flight on Venus [1985].

FMI: www.nasa.gov