Here are the 10 pictures taken by RTE camera during Flight 13 (sol 193), distorsion and colors corrected.






6 of the pictures can be combined as a travelling along a beautiful outcrop.
Click to view attachment

The flight details for flight #13 has been added to the interactive map, helicopter Flight Log and JSON feed.

The path etc for flight #12 has been adjusted on the interactive map.

Helicopter Status Update: 'Flying on Mars Is Getting Harder and Harder' (A high-speed rotor test, Flight #14 and much more) LINK

Wow! They are going to be getting more engineering data on flying a helicopter on Mars than they could ever have dreamed of.

I'm assuming this is the end of the 2800 rpm highspeed rotor spin-up test mentioned in the latest blog update
Two Sol 204 Navcam frames animated in a simple GIF.
If the test is deemed successful, there should be a short flight no earlier that sol 205 (later today)
Click to view attachment

1. Sounds like they aren't testing the higher speed on Earth before Mars. (I wonder if this is due to not having engineering budget at this phase, or other issues)
2. Who could have anticipated a JPL Mars vehicle lasting longer than expected.

Brian Swift

1) Nothing like testing on Mars to get Mars conditions!
2) We all did. But if your craft last into a different season with lower atmospheric pressure, your are forced to expand the design envelope

Has there been any reports of dust on the solar panels, and how the flights are adding or subtracting to solar panel output?

I tried to make a stereo view using a couple frames from neo56 post above but the result was a bit malformed, though its posted below anyways (crosseye) fwiw,
then i stumbled upon a much better JPL version of the same thing which seems to be in anaglyph form only, so made a crosseye out of a crop of that version posted below as well (grey).
Click to view attachmentClick to view attachment

An anaglyph can be turned into an x-eyed stereo by putting it into your photoshop, splitting the image into R,G and B channels, discarding the Green channel and saving the R and B channels as grayscale right and left (I forget which is which).

--Bill

Thanks, I will have to try that out sometime for kicks! but being lazy i used StereoPhotoMaker to open the JPL anaglyph in side-by-side mode and then used the color balance tools to equalize the contrast since it loses most of the color info by time it separates out the anaglyph composite.

Stereo Photo Maker is a good tool to work with anaglyphs. I've always been able to view stereo pairs with my bare eyes, so I've never been that keen on anaglyphs. Well, I've developed a cataract in one eye and can't do stereos til I get it fixed.

--Bill

Thanks to nprev for interrupting the unpleasant argumentation in the other thread.
In the meantime, I've prepared a replay on a post by mcaplinger that may be of general interest.


Here is an overview of all helicopter raw color photos so far.
The white balance was sometimes changed for unknown reasons. I checked all raw images from sol 193 (here is a link to one of them).
Apparently, the images on sol 193 were processed in-camera with an automatic white balance that completely removed any color cast.
This can be verified by averaging the values of R, G, and B in each image. They are identical R=G=B within a rounding error of 1.
This means that the average of all colors in an image is a neutral gray. Because of the predominant orange tone in the Martian landscape,
this auto white balance results in some bluish features (sky, some rocks) in the raw images.

Click to view attachment

Tau, my suspicion (and I have no proof) is that a color balance change was applied as the images were archived. Unless a bit gets flipped in the on-camera setup, that color balance setting is not likely to change. I would even doubt that there is a way to change it on the aircraft. Tweaking an image "in post" is the likely explanation.
Remember, this is a simple, but high quality, color camera placed on a technology demonstration aircraft.

--Bill

I don't think this is the case, I think that the white balance behavior changes unpredictably as a function of what's in the scene and possibly due to some adaptive algorithm inside the camera.

That sounds right. If you compare these two sol 64 frames from the main "raw" image server they have very different colour balance, even though they share some of the same ground features:
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020-raw-images/p...3_000085J02.png
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020-raw-images/p...0_000085J02.png
The corresponding RAD calibrated images on the PDS look more similar to each other, but still quite different:
https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mars2...3_000085J04.png
https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/mars2...0_000085J04.png
So the different colour balance has only been partially corrected in the calibration. That suggests the different balances are in the original (downlinked) images, rather than in post-processing.

Helicopter Status Update:

2,800 RPM Spin a Success, but Flight 14 Delayed to Post Conjunction
News Release
Click to view attachment

I’ve been mulling over this comment by Brian.

I suppose it makes sense that JPL hasn’t provided extra budget to the Ingenuity team for the same kind of ongoing precautionary earth testing that is routine for rover operations. Funding the extended mission at all might have been a scramble. Furthermore: the project is a limited-scope technology demonstration that has already accomplished much more than expected; helicopter failure won’t jeopardize any part of the rest of the mission; Ingenuity’s own telemetry likely provides sufficient guidance for cautious experimentation; and diminishing returns may be setting in.

But one countervailing consideration has just occurred to me, namely that engaging in earth testing in parallel with the ongoing flights could be an opportunity to validate and improve the way JPL simulates Martian conditions for testing aircraft. I don’t know enough to assess whether it would in fact be useful for this purpose, and I suppose that if this were a compelling reason for ongoing earth testing, JPL would be doing it.

I do hope that a member of the engineering team writes a book about the project.

Meanwhile, Ingenuity conducted a successful test of spinning at 2,800 RPM, but a subsequent attempt at a short test flight at 2,700 RPM was aborted after its telemetry detected an anomaly in servo motors.

2,800 RPM Spin a Success, but Flight 14 Delayed to Post Conjunction https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter...st-conjunction/

Servos are wonderful feedback mmechanisms that accurately position themselves. Jitter is not unheard of.
Human pilots with R/C do a servo wiggle with their transmitter sticks before flight; Ginny is using good practice cancelling the flight.

--Bill

Just noticed this:

Ingenuity Mission Update - Teddy Tzanetos - 2021 Mars Society Virtual Convention

Flight 14

https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter...return-journey/

Next flight could be as early as tomorrow, and it will begin the return to the landing area and beyond.

Phil

SOL 241 -- the last 30 images performing touchdown
Landing leg in top right
GIF
Click to view attachment

Although I haven’t yet found an official or team announcement, Ingenuity’s Flight 15 apparently did take place on Saturday November 6.

Phil put the flight path in his latest mapping update, http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&p=255038, and now “frames by rado” has put together a stylish video that tracks the path on previous Perseverance and MRO images, along with a few b&w & color images taken during the flight itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQB2hMo4-EM

At about 1:05 in this video, there’s an attractive color image of Ginny with a somewhat dusty solar panel that’s new to me.

That image is from sol 47, just after deployment.

Phil

Aha, I had leapt to the conclusion that it would have taken several months for the solar panel to accumulate so much dust, and thus that it was a more recent image. And I was a little puzzled that Mastcam-z could take such a clear image, even with its more powerful lens, in light of the distance that Ingenuity is kept from the rover

Thanks for clearing that up. And I guess now I do more or less recall that image, or a similar one, except that I had forgotten that the solar panel was so dusty so early, before <google, google> the blades had been spun for the first time, which I see happened on Sol 48.

Sol 254 helicopter color photos have just arrived. Here is one of them (with enhanced colors).

Click to view attachment

Pictures taken by RTE camera during Flight 15 (sol 254). Distorsion, vignetting and color balance corrected.

Sorry for asking, but I promised to answer the request published by the Wikipedia member at the Ingenuity page. As far as I remember the ICAO/USAF alphabet (alpha-bravo-charlie… up to yankee-zulu), the next letter after 'hotel' is 'india', not 'juliet'.

However entry 16 in the https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/#Flight-Log names the landing site „Airfield J“.

Should it be interpreted as a misprint or as a reserve for a backward renaming of some of the most distant of three „Airfield H“’s?

Maybe they're avoiding I and O to avoid confusion with 1 and 0?

I am sorry, but I must argue your hypothesis. I would not mention ICAO and USAF if I haven't remembered from the end of 70-ies the area codes for some airfields including 4-letter military like EDAR (Ramstein), EDAF (Rhein-Main etc.) - and it was 20 years before the electronic age started.
Anyway, up to present:

• CID - Cedar Rapids/Iowa City, Iowa, Eastern Iowa
• COS - Colorado Springs, Colorado
• JAX - Jacksonville, Florida, Jacksonville International

Since Wright Brothers airfield is ICAO-acknowleded as JZRO (both 'J' and 'O' are present), I assume they shall not make exclusions from the airfield naming standards.

Either, if there are any doubts, the practice of non-customizable vehicle registration plates is to exclude both ambiguous local alphabet letters, like Ш and Щ (derivatives from the Hebrew 'shin', ש) in Ukraine and other countries using the Cyrillic alphabet. In this case both 'I' and 'J' should be excluded from the set.

UPD forward: Dear Floyd, I acknowledge your answer as well, but sorry for not answering you in a separate post. I don't want to be the reason of discussion. I brought here the question from a Wikipedia member with the only fair intention to verify whether "J" was a misprint or there were another reasons for omitting "I". Maybe I was politically wrong in unwrapping the arguments of fredk, but his statement ended with the question mark, so this was a hypothesis and I had to put forward my grounds for not accepting it.

At this point I stop here. My version of misprint is supported with another, more seriuos 'misprint' which everybody may find on the screenshot from the NASA's 'Flight log' page. I kindly ask anybody who is sure that "J" was used intentionally to write his answer in Wikipedia at this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ingenuity_(helicopter). No registration required. Thank everybody for their attention and patience.

To end this dialogue with something positive allow me to present you one of my last works for wiki. Direct link is Perseverance_route_elevation_profile_sols_1–239.png

Thank you again,

Cherurbino

I'm with Fredk. I often avoid symbols that are poorly differentiated in sans serf fonts. For writing up scientific research, I teach my students to to make integers and letters all differentiable even if scribbled. You don't want to confuse a 2 and a 7 or a 6 and a 0.

Some more thoughts and calculations regarding the enigmatic X-shaped shadow effect first mentioned in post #442 and discussed in subsequent posts.
If it has something to do with sunlight, it could be helpful to know the displacement of the helicopters shadow with time before take-off.

The X is faintly visible on airfield G in the first color photo of the helicopters 11th flight. Some features visible in this photo could be correlated with features in the HiRISE map. This allowed to orientate Ingenuity's color image.
The dark shadow of flying helicopter and the X were used to scale the image.
The elevation and azimuth of the sun at the location and time were calculated by coding the algorithm from "Mars24 Sunclock — Time on Mars. Algorithm and Worked Examples" and an algorithm for the Julian Day number (link).
The timeline in the image below shows the shift of the shadow (blue) with time. The X is marked wit a white outline.
T is the time of helicopter take-off on sol 163. Already at T - 1 h there is a significant difference between the current shadow and the X, that means, the X remembers Ingenuity's shadow only shortly before take-off, presumably within less than 15 minutes.
Any process connected with sunlight should be a short-time process (within a few minutes), and should be reversible, like tenebrescence, in which a mineral like hackmanite changes color upon exposure to ultraviolet light.
Frost can most likely be ruled out due to the short-term effects of shifting sunlight and shade. The actual reason for the X remains still unknown.

Click to view attachment

A similar shadow effect could not be detected at any other airfield. Something seems to be special about airfield G.

Possibly an electrostatic phenomena. Theoretically interaction between Ingenuity's blades and atmospheric dust will result in a significant charge in the vehicle during operation and once landed there would be an interaction between Ingenuity and charged particles on the surface. From the image, possibly clearing light dust from underlying rock.

The possibility of rotor tribocharging was raised by Farrell et al https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2102/2102.04181.pdf

Yeah, that's consistent with the sharpness of the X as seen in the navcams just after takeoff. With a longer-timescale process the X should be visibly smeared in the direction of motion of the shadow. Thanks for the shadow analysis!

I can't see an electrostatic interaction between the rotors and ground producing a sharp shadow, unless sunlight (or lack of it) was also involved.

What was the reason for taking this ground photo by RTE on November 15, 2021 (sol 263 of the Perseverance rover mission), i.e. between the flights 15 and 16?

Stored at https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/r...LI00000_000085J

The electric field has the property of superposition, that means, the field around a charged body is the sum of the individual fields of the charged point sources that make up the body.
Let us imagine for a moment that an elevated charged body can produce a shadow-like electric field beneath it on the ground.
This would necessarily require that a charged point source located above the ground has field lines that converge at the nadir point on the ground.

In reality, the field around a point source looks like in the figure below. I calculated the electric potential (stepwise gray in the picture) using formula 4.55 in Example 1 of "Electrostatics of Dielectrics" by E.Y. Tsymbal.
The black lines are electric field lines iteratively calculated as lines following the gradient of the potential.
A value of 5 was used for the relative dielectric constant of the ground. The general pattern of the field lines does not change significantly for other values.

The strength of the field is proportional to the density of the lines. We see that the strength is much lower on the ground than around the point source and decreases smoothly with distance.
Thus, a fairly sharp "electrostatic image" on the ground caused by charged rotor blades can be ruled out.

Click to view attachment

The charge on Ingenuity would be a distributed source rather than a single point source with spreading spherical attenuation. Charged dust particles on the ground having the same polarity would be repelled. The field strength would be subject to the standard variables of distance, permeability etc and a basic visualisation would be field vectors between two plates of different size with the same polarity. So the interaction with charged dust particles on the ground would pretty much reflect Ingenuity's configuration and repelling the dust would change the albedo. The force would be weak but the dust particles are minuscule. Just one possibility as an alternative to the influence of ingenuity's shadow.

I don't find any of the explanations very convincing. Why don't these effects occur at other sites? I expect someone is looking at it, and it's possible that the unusual image taken on the surface on sol 263 was part of an investigation.

Phil

Maybe it's a new campaign to get a better understanding of the terrain at the landing site?

Another RTE was acquired a few sols after Flight 16 on sol 274...

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020-raw-images/p...0_000085J01.png

The first color photo from Ingenuity's 16th flight on sol 268 (colors enhanced, hence the blue appearance of the sky).
A dust devil is faintly visible in the distance.

Click to view attachment

The last color photo from Ingenuity's 16th flight on sol 268 with rover tracks (colors enhanced)

Click to view attachment

Although the quality at the short distances is incompatible with Perseverance, artists may enjoy the non-typical colors in the martian gamma from pearl to ultramarine, and the most attentive amateurs may find a pebble in the camouflage robe of a two-color panda bear .

Attachment is resized; original 1,280×800 may be downloaded from Wikipedia commons.

Here are the 9 pictures taken by RTE camera during Flight 16. Distorsion, vignetting and color balance corrected.







And these 9 pictures as an animation:
Click to view attachment

A picture taken by RTE camera while Ingenuity was on the ground, on sol 274 (November 27, 2021).
Numerous colorful pebbles are visible in the FOV.

More in this Ingenuity team update: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter...overing-limits/

Also, an interesting interview with Olivier Toupet, who has been a rover driver for MER, Curiosity, and now Perseverance, giving his assessment of the extent to which Ingenuity has contributed to the primary mission.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/mars-perseverance

Mars Science Helicopter, I like the sound of that! The link in the interview article gives some great details (not sure how we missed it before!)

< Nprev-- please delete -- thanks >

Any more info on this latest flight?

https://www.slashgear.com/nasa-lost-contact...s-10701898/amp/

--Bill

The team update the helicopter blog on December 9, 2021:

"On Wednesday (Sol 285 in Perseverance’s mission on Mars) the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter relayed additional information on its status. The limited data that was received indicates power aboard the rotorcraft is excellent, which suggests it is in an upright stance, allowing its solar array to efficiently power its six lithium-ion batteries. However, the same line-of-sight issues the team believes impeded communications at the end of Flight 17 still prevented the majority of data packets (including imagery from the flight) to be relayed back to the rover – and then to Earth. The next opportunity for a data transfer is expected to occur sometime within the next several days."

Since then they have received and published 5 Navcam images from the last moments of the flight, and they have also updated the interactive map using the JSON data (elevation, coordinates etc)