This is why Mars Helicopters Ingenuitas NASA is a friend of perseverance

NASA’s perseverance rover can plan a scientific course that was previously considered too risky, with the MARS helicopter ingenuity provided mission control with unexpected insight from the sky. Although ingenuity only flew nine mission so far – despite innovative experiments in their own rights – photography collected by a vital proven helicopter to take advantage of the time of disputes on the red planet.

With Rovers before, like curiosity, NASA must depend on the combination of two extreme survey tools because of planning a path to be taken. At one end there is another camera and sensor on Rovers itself, providing land surface views from the surface of the planet.

In another extreme, meanwhile, there are mars surveillance orbiters. Through the planet, hit the surface image. However, it can only finish the stone in a diameter of about 3 feet.

It leaves a mission planning in a complicated place, because to avoid potentially damaging the explorers they need to take a careful path when it comes to indirect fields in seeing their own cameras. Ingenuity, however, provides an extraordinary middle perspective.

The shot arrested during his last flight was taken from a height of about 33 feet. “As soon as a rover is close enough to the location, we get a land scale image that we can compare with images of orbitals,” Ken Williford, deputy perseverance of scientists in the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, explained. “With ingenuity, we now have a medium-scale image that is well filled in gaps in resolution.”

For example, ingenuity yells at the nearest rock features called NASA “Ridges Ridges”; There is speculation that they can be a way to drink ancient water, billions of years ago. As a result, they can also be a site where the microbial colony after being built, feeding minerals from the lake water. Helicopter photos will help guide perseverance to the best place for sampling.

On the other hand, ingenuity can also help make go / no-go decisions on potential routes. “This helicopter is a very valuable asset for rover planning because it provides a high-resolution image that we want to go through,” JPL’s Olivier Backpack explained. “We can better assess the size of the dunes and where bedrock poke. It’s great information for us; this helps identify which area can be traversed by Rover and whether certain high-value science targets can be reached.”

For example, the image captured by ingenuity marks one potential Dune field as too risky for Rover to try to cross: the surface of the sandy can cause perseverance to BOG. Another set of images from other places in Jezero crater gives scientists at a glance of other rock formations that will be inaccessible to Rover in the field. The inner sand may leave non-moving perseverance.

“When The Rover works on the Dune field, it might make the team call” dip toe “into some scientific interesting places with interesting basic rocks,” NASA explained. “While the backpack and his team will not try to swim feet here, the pictures recently from ingenuity will allow them to plan the potential pathway pants in other areas along the route of the first science campaign.”