‘Great Leap’ for NASA’s Mars Plane Usher in New Mission Support Role

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Dotted with boulders and sand dunes, the Séítah region of Mars was too tricky for NASA’s Perseverance rover to drive through. So the rover’s small helicopter flew over the area on Monday and took some photos of a prime location on the other side. In less than three minutes, creativity and perseverance saved the months he would have spent driving to take his own photos.

Monday morning’s quick jump through Séítah was Ingenuity’s ninth flight to the surface of Mars to date, but it was the first time the helicopter had given a helping hand to the Perseverance in its search for signs of ancient life at Jezero Crater on the Red Planet. The four-pound helicopter arrived at Mars on February 14, attached to the Perseverance underside, and became the first object to make a flight on another world on April 19. Its initial set of flights were increasingly complex practice tests to show how out-of-the-world helicopters can fly around where wheeled vehicles can’t.

“This was a huge leap – a big leap – in terms of what we’ve done before.”

But on Monday, NASA engineers pushed the boundaries of creativity further than ever. At 166 seconds, Ingenuity flew nearly 11 mph for nearly a half mile, or 2,050 feet — a far greater distance than its last flight in June, which was 525 feet. The helicopter circled different corners of the city of Sittah and took photographs of its boundaries, where the intersections between the various rock formations – called contacts, in the parlance of geology – constitute some of the most scientifically intriguing goals in the perseverance search for fossilized microbial life.

“This was a huge leap — a big leap — in terms of what we did before. We went between locations that were 620,625 meters apart, which is a huge number compared to what we’ve done before,” the chief pilot for Ingenuity Harvard Grip said in an interview. The Ingenuity images, expected in the coming days after traveling through a delayed data pipeline from Mars to Earth, will help engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory determine whether to send perseverance down a path to collect rock samples in that contact area.

The mission is “designed to be high-risk and high-reward, which means that it makes sense for us to take on this additional risk because of the potential rewards,” Grip said.

The path of the ninth Ingenuity flight, Photo: NASA/JPL

Originally designed to fly short trips from point A to B, the ingenuity plunged into one of Séítah’s eroded craters, slowed its speed, and ascended the slopes for the first time while dancing along a winding path. Its autonomous navigation algorithms were written to only predict flight over flat terrain, so engineers modified the blade and convinced the helicopter that the Séítah’s rugged features were flat. This required several simulations in preparation for the flight, essentially predicting whether the helicopter could spiral out of control under its new flight directions. There were no accidents, and Ingenuity managed to reach the target rock formation on the other side of Séítah.

“Let’s go to the extreme, and let’s take a risk and cross Sittah.”

“This was the first time we’ve really said, ‘Let’s go too far, let’s take a risk and cross Sittah,’ which we know is very difficult terrain to traverse in a rover,” Ken Williford, deputy project scientist at Mission Perseverance said in an interview.

Sending a small drone across a potentially dangerous field of thick sand to search for cold Martian rocks is a huge time-saver for the persistence team. “When scientists can get those images of this connection early, we can start the scientific process much earlier than we would otherwise, and start making observations and interpretations and understanding what those rocks are,” Williford says.

A photo of Séítah taken by Ingenuity in May during its sixth voyage. More recent photos of Séítah from the helicopter’s ninth flight were not immediately available. Photo: NASA/JPL

The rover has its own cameras, primarily designed to analyze nearby rocks and views of Mars. Sensors aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite 155 miles above the surface of Mars, are giving the Perseverance team images of rocky targets that are far away but lack the close-up detail that a helicopter like Ingenuity can provide.

The helicopter is set to retire after the first five flight shows to allow the Perseverance team to focus on its own business. But after Ingenuity passed its fourth flight in late April, engineers decided to expand the rover’s mission to Mars to show how helicopters could help future spacecraft conduct science. Some mid-flight images of Ingenuity taken during the test flights were fitting for persistence scientists, but Monday’s flight marked the first time it had taken off with a single mission to assist the rover’s science team.

A ‘Very Unique Interaction’ between the teams Perseverance and Creativity

Williford said that NASA leadership has agreed to expand the Ingenuity mission on the condition that it does not disturb or interfere with the primary Perseverance mission. Since then, a small “interface” team of engineers of Perseverance and Creativity, serving as an operational glue between the two tasks, has been expanded to include persistence scientists where the innovation has proven to be more scientifically beneficial than expected. For most NASA missions, these interface teams sometimes cause controversy and contention as excited scientists negotiate technical risks with more risk-averse spacecraft engineers. Williford says the team of creativity and perseverance is surprisingly smooth.

“This has been a very unique interaction, where I can go in there and say, ‘You know what would be cool? If we can get here, then hear Bob Balaram [Ingenuity’s chief engineer] Say, “Yes, let’s do that!” “It’s really pushing his team forward,” said Williford, who also serves as director of the Astrobiochemistry Laboratory at JPL. “It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done, really. Working with these engineers and a few other scientists to plan these trips, I feel like a 12-year-old again, honestly.”

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