Ingenuity- Mars 2020 Helicopter, Deployment & Operations Options

[Art Martin]

Here's some comments I found on the Ingenuity press kit regarding the 60 days that had been used earlier and more info about the 5 flights. Bolding is by me.

"Once a suitable site to deploy the helicopter is found, the rover’s Mars Helicopter Delivery System will shed the landing cover, rotate the helicopter to a legs-down configuration, and gently drop Ingenuity on the surface in the first few months after landing. Throughout the helicopter’s commissioning and flight test campaign, the rover will assist in communications back and forth from Earth. The rover team also plans to collect some images of Ingenuity."

That seems to indicate that the deployment and test could occur at any time up to 60 days.

"Ingenuity will attempt up to five test flights within a 30-Martian-day (31-Earth-day) demonstration window."

That's fascinating that they believe Ingenuity has the potential to last up to 30 SOLs. If tests go well I'm sure those 5 will get done as early in that window as possible to ensure that any early failures from the cold nights don't limit the number done. If you get them all done in a couple of weeks and the thing is still going strong I can't believe there's not the potential for extending past 5.

[Art Martin]

An update. Just saw an answer to a Twitter post from the "rover" asking when deployment would be and it said there'd be a couple of weeks of system testing first. When in doubt, ask the source....

[Marvin]

The rover team also plans to collect some images of Ingenuity.

Ingenuity has a 13 MP color camera and 0.5 MP black and white navigation camera.

So along with images of the terrain from altitude, I hope we get some images of Perseverance from Ingenuity as well.



https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25530/mars-...ding-press-kit/

[mcaplinger]

So along with images of the terrain from altitude, I hope we get some images of Perseverance from Ingenuity as well.

If you read the press kit, you'll see that for safety reasons the helicopter never gets anywhere close to the rover (130ish meters), so this is not very likely, considering that the max altitude is stated as 5 meters.

[edit: I don't know how wide the FOV of the "horizon facing" color camera is or how it's pointed, so maybe there is some possibility it can catch the rover.]

[nprev]

Per the press kit the expected effective radio range is 1000m, so I wonder if the Ingenuity XM plan is to send her out ahead of the expected rover path as a scout after accomplishing the core tech demo objectives as a follow-on operational utility test. Not sure how much that might slow down Perseverance, though, which has its own minimum mission objectives to meet.

[Explorer1]

Even if relaying to and from the rover has no negative effects on the science mission, in terms of data and planning time, the availability of personnel (and funding!) is another potential bottleneck on further flights.
But I just don't see a perfectly functional independent spacecraft being abandoned just like that (think of the negative PR alone! People grow attached to these things....)

[Marvin]

If you read the press kit, you'll see that for safety reasons the helicopter never gets anywhere close to the rover (130ish meters), so this is not very likely, considering that the max altitude is stated as 5 meters.

[edit: I don't know how wide the FOV of the "horizon facing" color camera is or how it's pointed, so maybe there is some possibility it can catch the rover.]

The safety of the rover must be the primary consideration.

I found the following for the Ingenuity color camera, called RTE:

"Return-to-Earth (RTE) Camera. This is a rolling shutter, high-resolution 4208 by 3120 pixel sensor (Sony IMX214) with a Bayer color filter array mated with an O-film optics module. This camera has a FOV of 47 deg(horizontal) by 47 deg (vertical) with an average IFOV of 0.26 mRad/pixel...pointed approximately 22 deg below the horizon"

https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publication...AA2018_0023.pdf

[fredk]

4208 by 3120 pixel sensor... FOV of 47 deg(horizontal) by 47 deg (vertical)

There seems to be an error in that document, unless the camera has weird optics that compress horizontally to give a bad aspect ratio.

Anyway, those specs give a rover size of something on the order of 100 pixels at 130 metres. So if it's in the FOV, we'll see something.

[Andreas Plesch]

The NASA Radioisotope Power Systems web pages have a very detailed 3d model of the rover.

It looks like a full engineering drawing and if you look at the belly has both Ingenuity stowed away in its protective shell and also the sampling system cover which was just dropped unceremoniously.

This gave me a much better understanding of the current location and orientation of the helicopter.

Looking at the web page in detail, it looks like the 3d model is fbx converted to lzf compressed PLY format, for which there is a parser to extract triangles, normals and colors. This seems to be generated by a JPL protospace system which in turns uses Hololens for AR.

[Marvin]

This gave me a much better understanding of the current location and orientation of the helicopter.

Here's an image of the helicopter attached to the rover at the Kennedy Space Center on April 6, 2020:


NASA/JPL-Caltech

An animated gif showing the testing of the deployment sequence:


NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed Martin

[Explorer1]

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-to-host-...icopter-flights

Telecon on March 23rd about the chosen flight location. Looks like the first week of April for flight.

[Art Martin]

This just came up on Twitter. Things seem to pointing to a few days drive to the selected site and dropping the protective cover. Then about a week of deployment activities.

https://twitter.com/NASAPersevere/status/13...8641884160?s=20

[MrNatural]

Ingenuity has a 13 MP color camera and 0.5 MP black and white navigation camera.


https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25530/mars-...ding-press-kit/

I wonder how much of a dust cloud it will kick up and how much that will interfere with its imagery. I guess we will find out, but I am not setting my expectations too high.

[Mogster]

I wonder how much of a dust cloud it will kick up and how much that will interfere with its imagery. I guess we will find out, but I am not setting my expectations too high.

Not Mars but Nevada.

https://youtu.be/ojZeso5tVYk

[mcaplinger]

Debris shield dropped.