Has anybody heard about the prolongation of Ingenuity support for the next 6 months?
The last term expired this September.

Now that helicopters are an integral part of the MSR architecture, I doubt if there will be any issues with funding Ingenuity until it dies.

Financial architecture is somehow different from the technical one. Transfer from 'tech demo' to 'operations demo' was a great financial solution opening the doors for flights 6-33. However opening the doors does not automaticaly lit a green light all the way through. The first prolongation ended in August 2021. The Septmber 2021 statement of AFP about 'lifetime' funding was quickly called back by NASA. GAO in Washington knows its job and shall not allow to spend a penny without the underlying budget.

You may not appreciate the subtleties of how funding flows from NASA to JPL projects. For example, NASA centers and FFRDCs have something called a Director's Discretionary Fund that can be used for various purposes. TBH I don't know how Ingenuity was funded in the first place, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't entirely from the Mars 2020 budget line item.

At any rate, I have heard nothing official and can only offer my opinion, informed by 30+ years of working on JPL-funded projects.

Dear mcaplinger, first of all thank you for your comments. They are valuable for me anyway, becase the absence on information is also the information of specific kind. And it's a pity that 1,5 years after the first flights almost nobody tracks the events and the helicopter itself.
My interest to this issue is somehow deeper than an idle curiosity: I still continue to supplement the article about 'Ingenuity' in Wikipedia. Just now it passes a kind of control in the context of some nomination. It supposes a temporary 'freeze' of the text when nobody shall be allowed to add any news, and the expected prolongation is of most importance, for this information sits in the first paragraph, directly in the preamble.



I may guess, for banking and finance was my job before I retired)).


I know that JPL Finance Director René Fradet used a kind of this fund to give Bob Balaram 'some study money' at a request of Charles Elachi, the JPL CEO at that time. This money started the Martian Helicopter project a few years before it was included into the budget of Mars 2020 mission.

MiMi Aung was present at that decisive conversation which took place at the drone demonstration. I don't know whether Wahid Nawabi was nearby at that moment, but drones have always been the job of his AeroVironment, and Bob Balaram did not have an alternative where to spend these money. Fuselage, chassis, rotors etc. 'hardware' for all the versions of 'Terry' including the last which became 'Ingenuity' came from this small team (see the attachment; don't know whether their names are mentioned on the basement of the Collier Trophy.) AFAIK, drone construction is the job of AeroVironment, while JPL put it together with its own (or COTS) avionics, soft and NASA funding, of course.

Enhanced image from Ingenuity's high-resolution color camera, sol 567
The footprints of the helicopter where it restet from sol 561 to sol 567 are marked with circles.
The bright area around the helicopter's shadow is due to the opposition effect.

Click to view attachment

…and the remoteness of the shadow and its smaller size on the frame indicate that noon has passed a few hours ago. Exactly, 16:18 LMST - this is the latest of all 33 departures.

Enhanced flight+photo log for the operations demo phase (6–33)... sorry that it needs some translation

Ingenuity made a short flight on Sol 625.

See JPL tweet: https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1595511443096752129

+ JPL status report #420 Flight 34 Was Short But Significant

Significant, but astounding that it has lasted that long. That says a lot about the selection of components.

Interesting the helicopter has the cpu capacity and the storage to use the new software, mainly the cpu power.

Can't find any right now, but ISTR discussions to the effect that Ingenuity's cellphone CPU is faster and more capable than the Perseverance CPU, albeit not qualified for radiation and the other hazards of a lengthy space mission.

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

"The SnapdragonTM processor from Intrinsyc® with a Linux operating system performs high-level functions on the
helicopter. The SnapdragonTM processor has a 2.26 GHz Quad-core SnapdragonTM 801 processor with 2 GB Random
Access Memory (RAM), 32 GB Flash memory, a Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART), a Serial
Peripheral Interface (SPI), General Purpose Input/Ouput (GPIO), a 4000 pixel color camera, and a Video Graphics
Array (VGA) black-and-white camera. "

I believe this largely constitutes the previous generation Qualcomm Drone Dev-Kit.


While the M20 main avionics are, I believe, the same 133Mhz RAD750 that MSL has, M20 also has a small Intel Atom board for the EDL camera suite ( https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.10...020-00765-9.pdf ) and the 'vision compute element' that was used for the landing and since handed over to accelerate visual odometry / autonav. ( https://lsic.jhuapl.edu/uploadedDocs/presen...Maps_LVS_v0.pdf )

Yes, the helicopter's Snapdragon 801 has about 16x more DRAM and 16x faster processor clock rate than the RAD750. But the helicopter's core microcontroller (TMS570LC43x) is only a little bit faster than the RAD750 and has less DRAM.

https://rotorcraft.arc.nasa.gov/Publication...AA2018_0023.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750

Flight 35 by the numbers

Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Flight number 35 Preview

◦ Flight number: 35
◦ Date of flight: NET Dec. 3
◦ Flight duration: 52.22 seconds
◦ Horizontal flight distance: 50 feet (15 meters)
◦ Flight speed (horizontal): 10.0 fps (3.0 mps)
◦ Max flight altitude: 46 feet (14 meters)
◦ Flight goal: Reposition helicopter

Sol 642: a helicopter flight going about 57 m northwest and then back to the starting point, almost exactly. I am wondering if it was a test of Autonav software.

Phil

Here is a reconstructed flight path of Ingenuity on sol 642 (with a length of about 58 m in one direction), based on images from the helicopter's navigation camera.
The outbound and return trajectories were indeed identical, and the landing was within 1 meter of the launch position, judging from the navcam images.
The footprints of the helicopter are marked with blue circles.

Click to view attachmentClick to view attachment

One of the four pictures taken by Ingenuity during Flight 36. Really nice view on the delta front!

Looking back to when the flights had video documentation: a paper describing the video results on dust lifting is out (& open). Scroll to the bottom of this link to 'Supplementary Information' and there are a dozen videos processed to show dust lifting. Figure 4 illustrates the colorization used in the videos.

The Ingenuity chopper made its first flight in the new year on Sol 667 (Jan 7, 2022), flying 111 meters from Airfield Y to Z, at an altitude of 10 meters at a speed of 12.6 km/hour; the flight lasted 74.3 seconds.

Sol 673: Flight 39 is in the books. It flew NE and imaged a section of the 'bacon strip' to test the new flight software, before returning to the mega-ripple where its flight began


Note the 4 depressions where it landed after flight 38 in the first image (acquired just before landing). The second image is the section of the exposed bacon strip Northeast of airfield Z, the third image is the data extracted from the JSON URL, the last image is a screen capture from the interactive map showing the flight track and Airfield 'Z'

Click to view attachment Click to view attachment Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

Flight 42 has really scouted ahead. Here's a quick video of 100 frames that I manually grabbed from the raw images webpage that covers a combination of Flight 41 (Sol 689) and 42 (Sol 697).

https://stevealbers.net/allsky/sites/persev...nuity_polar.mp4

Steve, that is tremendous that Ginny is still able to fly and do useful science this far into the mission. I am honestly amazed that the flight batteries have lasted this long. This is a testament to the design and construction effort that went into this aircraft.

--Bill

Sol 697 image taken by Ingenuity with its high-resolution color camera.
The distance to the butte (or mesa?) on the right side is about 400 m.
Judging by this view, the rover will most likely take the eastern variant of the traverses (roughly estimated white line in the photo).

Click to view attachment

Map of the field of view of the helicopter photo in the preceding post.
Thin contour lines every meter, thick lines every 10 m.

Click to view attachment

Picture taken by RTE camera on sol 697. Flatfielded, distorsion and color corrected and sky extended.

I see Giny making quite long flights recently and very close to Belva crater. Do we know how far it’s from Perseverence ? It seems a bit far to have good coms.

Using the coordinates of the craft reported by JPL, the point-to-point (horizontal) distance is 659 meters, with an elevation difference of 14.45 meters (Flight #44 landing to the rover after the drive on Sol 715 to 34/0)

However the LOS (line-of-site) between the craft is not clear, the distance between the craft has been much greater earlier part of the mission, but with the terrain communications will be degraded. Saying that, the rover is just inside the shadow of the terrain, so a short drive on Sol 716 will rectify the shadow and full LOS

Here's the flight data /stats that I have compiled from the JSON files issued by JPL. There are some minor differences between the JSON data and the Helicopter flight log, but JSON is adjusted from time to time as more accurate data is made available. The 2nd image has the reported coordinates

Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

Pictures taken by Ingenuity during Flight 41 (sol 689). Vignetting, distorsion and colorimetry corrected.

Pictures taken by Ingenuity during Flight 42 (sol 697). Vignetting, distorsion and colorimetry corrected.

Update:

The rover drove ~North by 182 meters with a climb of 3.8 meters during sol 716 to site 34/952 (see map)

The point-to-point distance between the rover and the helicopter has now reduced to 504.2 meters, with an elevation difference of just 10.66 meters.

Line-of-sight (LOS) still appears to be restricted, but is not as bad as before.

However the next flight is already planned (#46) no earlier than February 25th, the planned distance is 445 meters, but its path is not clear (as it's scouting for future airfields), so I guess it depends where it lands and if the rover drives again on sol 717.

Watch this space

Click to view attachment

Animation of RTE pictures taken during flights 41 and 42 above Rockytop.

At the end of a record breaking drive on Sol 719, Perseverance used its NavCam to acquire the 4 tiles that make up this mosaic it happened to capture the helicopter. I have annotated the location of the heli on this roughly assembled / processed image, best viewed full size.

Ingenuity helicopter is 135 meters West of the rover (See map), and is stationed where it landed after completing flight number 46.

Also attached is the flight data / stats, this data is extracted from the M20 JSON URLs. The flight duration is omitted from the JSON, so some of the stats are not reporting correctly, but the plan was for 136 seconds, which is usually fairly close to the actual duration.

Edit: JPL have revised the various JSON landing coordinates for the helicopter. They now show the Helicopter on the next dune to the West. The distance between the two craft is now 145.76 meters (478.21 ft). The duration has also been added to JSON (135.86 seconds)

Click to view attachment Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

Potential ancient sandbars imaged by RTE camera during flight 46, sol 717.

A Mastcam-Z Left picture of Ingenuity taken on sol 724. We haven't seen Ingenuity this good for a long time!

This is easy to find but in case it's useful to anyone, here is a screen grab of the flight log.

Phil

Click to view attachment

Ingenuity as seen by Perseverance on sol 728 (Mastcam-Z right eye and anaglyph)

Click to view attachmentClick to view attachment

Edit: Corrected the name of the helicopter. Thank you for your hint, Explorer1.

I think you mean Ingenuity, Tau? Or has Perseverance seriously upgraded its capabilities when no one was looking?

Ingenuity in the vastness of the delta hilly landscape. Picture taken by MCZ Left on sol 729.

Ingenuity's flight 47 completed as planned on sol 729

Flight data from JSON, the updated mission map showing the new location, a Heli NavCam moments before landing and a link to an RTE acquired 16 seconds prior to landing LINK

Click to view attachment Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

Flight 47 video taken by the Left-eye Mastcam-Z camera, by James Sorenson

https://youtu.be/Blc8QsMS0OQ

Great video!! Best view of a dust cloud kicked up during take off that I've seen.

My take on this Flight 47 video. We see clearly the vortex generated during lift-off.

A seek-and-find picture, taken by Perseverance on sol 732. Where is Ingenuity?

Click to view attachment

1221 pixles from left, 205 pixels from top

I personally can't see it.

Yes, the helicopter is not easy to spot, otherwise it would not be a seek-and-find picture.
Here comes the image with an enlarged inset. Rotor blades, solar panel, body, and vertical axis are visible.
The helicopter's feet are hidden behind slightly elevated terrain in-between.

Click to view attachment

a little late but...
Ingenuity Liftoff on SOL 729
Enhanced -- there is a slight breeze from the camera position straight back up that hill.
The dust from the liftoff is not going up -- it is blowing away from the camera.
Also, as the helicopter levels off and starts to lean into going 'left' you can see its shadow at the bottom of the image

Here is a still:
Click to view attachment

Here is the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXQnizmXvaY

And I'm a bit late in commenting: EXTREMELY cool!!!! Thank you!

Flight 48 is in the bag.
Animated GIF of 10 frames from the landing sequence. The flight completed at 15:15 local time (~53 minutes earlier than recent flights that have landed after 16:00)
Annotated screen capture of the mission map & the flight data from JPL.

Click to view attachment Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

Thanks a lot PaulH51.
I hope that the next flight will take some nice panoramic pictures of Belva Crater from above.
This will be our only (and last) opportunity to see it up-close!