The US Space Agency, which promised to try again on Friday, said NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter failed to make its fourth flight to Mars for Thursday (29).
“The helicopter is safe and in good condition,” NASA said in a statement, saying the aircraft could not go into “flight mode”.
The team plans to try the flight at 2:46 pm GMT (11:46 pm GMT) on Friday to get the data to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory about three hours later.
The software problem is believed to have been the one that delayed the opening of the first motorized flight ingenuity on another planet.
Initially planned for 11 April, the historic achievement took place on the 19th.
The reason for the delay was a failure involving the aircraft’s “monitoring timer”, which alerts Ingenuity about potential problems and interrupts its processes if it believes it has detected an error.
The engineers made a coding adjustment, which allowed the helicopter to correctly overcome the problem and transition to flight mode, but estimated that there was a 15% probability that it would not work on each flight attempt.
“Today’s delay is in line with this expectation and does not prevent future flights,” NASA said.
Since arriving on Mars in the Perseverance robot vehicle in February, the 1.8-kg helicopter has made three successful flights.
In the last, which occurred on Sunday, it moved faster than the first with a maximum speed of 2 meters per second and a distance of 50 meters.
Congenital flights face very different circumstances from those found on Earth; The most important of them is a rare atmosphere that is less than 1% of our density, so the aircraft has to rotate its rotor at 2,400 revolutions per minute.
Microorganisms spent on Mars looking for signs of life: The demonstration of Ingenuity’s technology will be over in early May to return persistence to its core function.
