4th Flight Today - Thursday 4/29/2021
Quote:
Originally Posted by
-jk
Truly astonishing. One of my colleagues flew helicopters in the National Guard, including a couple deployments to Iraq. He was describing the difference between flying by wire and with assistance (you can't grab a sip of coffee when flying by wire). He can't fathom how they program that thing to fly on its own.
-jk
I imagine that the flat ground that was selected played into the approach that they picked for tracking the flight path. They said something about taking 100 pictures a second to track where Ingenuity was, and making calculations. I imagine that this would take the place of a GPS and a gyroscope for Ingenuity. Throw in a set of subroutines for each step of the test flight (i.e., up, left 50 meters, turn, back 50 meters, down), it would seem to be straightforward using assembled/remembered visual queues. They no doubt already did this whole thing here on earth already, just not with a 4 hour time delay.
I think the tough part was getting robust enough technology that would get to Mars and get placed where it is. Once there, it is performing as expected and engineered.
TODAY is the 4th flight.
Details here:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/with-g...ars-helicopter
The fourth Ingenuity flight from “Wright Brothers Field,” the name for the Martian airfield on which the flight took place, is scheduled to take off Thursday, April 29, at 10:12 a.m. EDT (7:12 a.m. PDT, 12:30 p.m. local Mars time), with the first data expected back at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California at 1:21 p.m. EDT (10:21 a.m. PDT).
You can probably tune into:
https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive
To see scientists going nuts, as they tend to do..
Larry
DevilHorse