The 3 color pictures taken by RTE camera aboard Ingenuity can be stitched together in a panorama. There is strong parallax between each pictures hence the tilted horizon on the left but still, it was nice to stitch a panorama taken from an altitude of 5m on Mars!

My hero! That's great.
Phil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNx9hcrUpww
No comment!

Alas the stationary camera. Where is Ed Fendell when you need him?

Don't you think we would move it if we could?

I was saying it in jest, but couldn't they program the camera to follow it?

You answer is right here Steve

This is Neo56's mosaic of images in a very rough reprojection. A very respectable map could be made of any area where pictures like these were taken.

Phil
Click to view attachment

No.

Can't say more, but here are a few technical terms: motor controllers, spread-spectrum radio, EMI.

Also clock drift. Wouldn't even know when to slew.

Not 100% clear that's true, but since slewing wasn't an option anyway, we didn't spend a lot of time digging into it.

https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2...12-3587_A1b.pdf

Here's an interesting 2012 paper titled The Effects of Clock Drift on the Mars Exploration Rovers. This sentence was an eyeopener: "When Spirit landed on Mars, its clock drift was about 10 seconds."

There's no capability to track an object in flight because there's no need; Ingenuity sends telemetry for the entire duration of the sorties, and there's nothing else moving on the surface that would need to be tracked (except the dust devils, which aren't exactly part of the primary mission and the other cameras have been catching just fine).

Be patient Steve! I wouldn't be surprised if the fetch rover designers are thinking of how to capture the MAV liftoff. It's a tricky problem. Even the Apollo missions took multiple attempts to track the ascent stage lifting off from the Moon, and that was with barely any light-speed lag.

Here's a comparison of Ingenuity locations before and after each flight, following on from the one I posted earlier. After flight 3 the landing was to the left of the initial position, and further back into the image, corresponding to about 1 footpad envelope (i.e. rectangle defined by the footpads) SW of the initial deployment site. I didn't expect such well-controlled landings.

Phil
Click to view attachment

I understand that the camera cannot pan and follow the movement of the Ingenuity in flight, but I do not understand why the rover was not moved to a more favorable angle that would allow it to record the entire flight.

I want to think that there are more images, from other cameras, and that have not yet been downloaded, that show the entire flight. I would be surprised if that important part of the flight had not been recorded, where the Ingenuity has to decelerate, hover, turn and go back in the opposite direction. I understand that it is an important phase of testing.

On the other hand, I am surprised that no more high resolution color images have been taken or displayed from "Ingenuity". So far we have only seen three images, but I suppose they have taken more.
Another thing that also surprises me is that we have not yet seen an image of "Perseverance" taken from "Ingenuity". Of course, it would be one of the images of the mission.

There are still images to download and more test flights. I hope that now that the project has achieved all its main engineering objectives, it will surprise us with something else.

Mosaic of 3 pictures taken by Navcam Left camera during the 3rd flight of Ingenuity. The helicopter is visible on each of the 3 pictures.

Excellent Thomas!

Comparing the images of the panorama that you just published, with the video that has been published by the team from the images captured by the Mastcam-Z, it is possible that we will see a video of the complete flight from the images of the Navcam and showing a much larger area.
Have to wait...

The cameras both point down (the colour one is at a bit of an angle, so it can catch parts of the horizon), and since they cannot fly near the rover, it is very difficult to get it in frame. Possibly if they just flew straight up to maximum altitude it might be possible at the top of the flight to squeeze it into the frame, but I don't know height is one of the things they are testing on the last two flights.

It may be also possible but probably difficult to execute to take the picture with the rover in a tilted orientation, presumably flying backwards, away from the rover. Sofar the pictures have been taken from a more stationary position, but exposure duration may allow also a moving camera.

Agreed. How awesome it would be to get a nice clear video of the entire flight.

The engineers must be getting all the flight data they need from the sensors on board though. Visual evidence of the flight having occurred is a bonus but it is not the heart of the data from their perspective.

The imaging devices we send to Mars are highly overdeveloped yet under-powered because that is just the way we do things when it comes to space - step by step, timidly (and very expensively). That careful but plodding progress has achieved a lot of science by not failing during missions.

My hope is that engineers are already building much more modern camera systems into their mission designs and may be encouraged by companies like SpaceX to think more bravely about risk, at least in terms of sensors which, if they fail, don't destroy the mission. The ability to create 4K 120fps video, compressed on the fly in HEVC is in the palms of our hands (or pockets) now and very cheap. The R&D has been done by Samsung and Apple for us.

I know I have made this point before so I won't do that again but the idea of having a high quality video of the second helicopter to fly on Mars is just too tasty a dream of mine not to mention it and maybe advocate for it.

One would assume that flight software could very precisely align the clocks of both vehicles without any adjustments to either by using NTP. This should enable synching to within milliseconds. There may be other synching issues if the helicopter has to make its own decisions about when to take off, how fast to fly and how it navigates.

As much as we may gripe about getting more and better videos (I am among the biggest gripers sorry to say), Ingenuity has surpassed all expectations and really set our collective imagination soaring. How far could we take powered flight on Mars? Right now, it is hard to conceive of limits.

Interesting. Did the slight shift in position after the first flight happen because the first image of the "home" position couldn't be acquired until after the craft was already in the air? Subsequent landings nailed the position.

EDIT: Nevermind, the shift was after the 3rd flight, not the first. It's Monday.

I can't go into all of the constraints on timing and parallel operations we have for helicopter imaging, but suffice it to say that I think we are doing as well as we can within all of them. If people are still disappointed, oh well.

The helicopter sends extensive telemetry about its performance and the rover imaging is just a "nice to have".

Maybe we could move any discussion about future missions and capabilities elsewhere. And I rather resent the use of terms like "timid", "plodding", etc. Newer members might want to review Rule 2.6.

I think what's being done is AMAZING. Thank you.

This aspect of the mission has been nothing short of fantastic... kudos to everyone involved and every wee scrap of data is much appreciated.

Not to rain on the parade, but it is easy to conceive of limits. While I predict many upcoming powerpoint presentations that will profess to indicate the feasibility of scaled-up Mars helicopters, and possibly even address the basics of disk loading and specific power, I expect that once you get into the details, the issues of aeroelasticity and motor heat rejection will show anything more than a factor of 2 or 3 more massive or longer-endurance than Ingenuity to be impractical.

The, I think lead engineer, said 25Kg was feasible and design studies have already started.

The limits I am finding difficult to conceive are geographic. Flight opens up vast areas of Mars for exploration and surveying in cm detail. Exploration does not require enormous helicopters. I'm certainly not thinking of people "getting to the chopper" and zooming around Mars any time soon.

Before Ingenuity, folks conceived of many limits of flying on Mars. So many in fact it was thought impossible to achieve. This experiment has shown us limits may often be misconceived and impede research.

Independence of rotorcraft on Mars will always be somewhat tenuous as they cannot carry all the communication gear or power generation that a rover platform can, or retain sufficient onboard power for extended flight. They would likely have to operate in tandem with one or more rovers or LTA platforms.

I suspect the main constraint to scaling up the design is battery capacity which likely does not scale linearly with lift (ie. rotor size). Present battery technology is not as energy dense as it will be in the future but better batteries will open up ever more possibilities. Better processors and AI will give even greater independence. That is likely to be an area where significant advances can be made in the near future. So I stand by my comment and the parade continues into the sunshine. LOL.

Not meant in any pejorative sense. What your imaging team has accomplished is nothing short of incredible. You are returning thousands of wonderful images from Mars for all of us to enjoy. You got your hardware there successfully and it is more than sufficient. Plodding is good. Timid is good. When billions are at stake you can't go crashing through a mission.

My comment was intended to be more generic - we proceed stepwise and very very carefully into space like toddlers and that has produced excellent insight and got us where we are. We try not to blow things up too much. It may be time to look at risk differently though in the exploration of space. Take a few more chances in order to get greater rewards. You guys are the pioneers. Don't get me wrong. You're blazing the trail for what comes next, which will hopefully leverage the most advanced image processing technology we have available, even only as a tech demo.

Eating my words from last page:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/ingenuity-s...ce-from-the-air

Yep, the barrel distortion worked to our advantage to squeeze the rover into the corner. Insanely cool to see her like this!

Based on the image, I make Ingenuity's location at just over 50 metres north of the deployment spot, roughly where the arrowed white dot that I've added to Phil's map is:
Click to view attachment

Picture taken by RTE camera on 3rd flight straightened and vignetting corrected.

Lovely. Thank you Thomas.

Hi!

This is my take on the third flight RTE image with Perseverance. I was unable to create a pleasing result with attempting to correct the deformations on the whole image. I must be missing something. It is 47x47 degree FOV, with an approx 22° tilt. But I am unable to get the horizon correct without creating a "valley", which is not there. So I just concentrated on the colors, noise, vignetting and contrast. After that I did what I could with the distortions and cropped it all to Perseverance.

This just got posted to the rover website.



With Goals Met, NASA to Push Envelope With Ingenuity Mars Helicopter

Going south for 133m, eg. outside the designated flight zone into terra incognita.

Here is quick map of the path from the description, in orange, taken rather literally as flying exactly south:
Click to view attachment
The arrow is at 84m where Ingenuity will start collecting navigation images every 1.2m, the distance between the dots.

And a perspective of the general flight path area from above the current location of the rover, with 4x exaggerated terrain:

Click to view attachment

The target area is about 1m higher in elevation than the air field, a difference the rotorcraft could adjust to if maintaining a certain flight height above ground is an objective.

It could be great from an EPO perspective if they could take pictures of the SkyCrane crash site and/or the parachute and its backshell from above (even from a distance)

Ingenuity - flight nr.3 in 3D

SBS and anaglyph available depending on the device. Taken on Sol 64 with the Mastcam-Z L and R cameras.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Xbq-rUwxMk

I just read on Twitter where the 4th flight did not get off the ground. No real details.

NASA JPL Twitter update as of about 2:40pm ET:

https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1387842380427001857

flight mode software issue strikes again?
https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-ingenu...h-flight-2021-4

LOL, go to the source instead of the re-reporter advertising impression mills!

from https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1387877961445953539

Further info:

from https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter...ur-rescheduled/
(same as the go.nasa.gov link provided in tweet)

Note that the rescheduled press conference will occur about an hour after flight #4 first results come down, so obviously they'll talk about / show those results in the presser.

There is also a sol 67 movie frame sequence of a close up, perhaps a test recording. There is no movement of any part of the helicopter.

Analysis of the timestamps show deltas between frames from 67ms to 73ms, with a somewhat systematic increase through the recording. This is about 14-15 frames/second, and faster than the 149ms for flight 2.

Here is a (not very interesting) gif with time stamps of the left ZCAM, close up:



And a full uncompressed animation as webp:

https://mars2020.surge.sh/ZL0_0067_ECV_N003..._110050J04.webp

There is a simultaneous frame sequence of a wider view with the right ZCAM. It has timestamp delta of about 141ms with some 7s to 15s gaps in frames which are not yet available or not recorded.



https://mars2020.surge.sh/ZR0_0067_N0032208..._026050J04.webp

Nothing seems to move anywhere.

The sol 68 right and left frame sequences of flight which is still to come have frame deltas between 141ms and 145ms.

right:



https://mars2020.surge.sh/ZR0_0068_N0032208..._026050J01.webp

left:



https://mars2020.surge.sh/ZL0_0068_N0032208..._026050J01.webp

Briefing on now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAlXe-U0ws4

Success of the 4th flight on sol 69. In the air and going south at 12:34:13 as captured by Perseverance, and then safely returned. Here back at its air field at 13.30 :

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/r...AM05054_110085J

The plan was for a 2 minute flight.

It looks like the landing drifted towards the dune to the east. Here a map of the estimated landing positions:

Click to view attachment

Perhaps one leg dipped into sand a bit.

That would be great. Does anyone know if that will happen?

I watched the press conference, it seems the primary use will be scouting for the rover and imaging terrain/geological features not accessible from the ground. Since the current drive path is planned to the southwest, and the EDL hardware is not in that direction, I doubt imagery will be possible. When they turn north towards the delta, perhaps, but Ingenuity would have to be seriously long lasting for that. The press release also mentions that conjunction will be coming up towards the end of summer, and that may be a time to end operations, if there hasn't bee a hardware failure by that point.

If a failure happens to Ingenuity (during flight or failing to survive the Martian night), maybe that might be worth detouring to inspect, though...