The helicopter returned to Earth mission teams on Friday night, prompting NASA to reschedule the first flight. The team reports that the helicopter remains safe and healthy and shares all its data.
Ingenuity conducted a high-speed test of its rotors on Friday. During this test, the command sequence ended early due to an expired guard timer.
This early end of the test happened when the helicopter was trying to change the flight computer from preflight to flight mode.
The timer monitors the command sequence and, if problems occur, alerts the system and keeps the helicopter safe by stopping until the problem can be resolved.
In this case, the timer did exactly what it was supposed to do, according to the agency.
Meanwhile, the Earth helicopter team is reviewing the data so they can determine the issue that closed the test. After this overhaul, the helicopter rotor high speed test will be rescheduled.
When ingenuity is able to fly to Mars for the first time, the 4-kilogram helicopter will fly for about 40 seconds in total. The helicopter will rotate its two 4-foot blades, rise 3 meters in the air, place it, turn it, take a picture and touch it back to Mars.
If this first flight is successful, ingenuity could fly four more times this month.
Now, he has to fly autonomously through the thin Martian atmosphere, without any help from his teams on Earth. The radio signals take 15 minutes and 27 seconds to cross the current gap between Earth and Mars, which stretches for 278.4 million kilometers.
The Perseverance Rover, which helps the helicopter and its Earth mission team communicate with each other, will receive flight instructions from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The rover will then send these plans to the helicopter. Perseverance will be parked at a view of 65 meters away from the helicopter, so that he can safely watch the flight and capture images and videos.