Engineers at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (Nasa’s) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have developed a software fix for a glitch that developed in the command system of the Ingenuity helicopter. The problem emerged during a pre-flight test sequence for the Martian aircraft which was undertaken on Friday. This was a high-speed spin test of its rotors, which ended early when a monitoring and safeguarding system called ‘watchdog timer’ detected a glitch and terminated the test. Ingenuity is a a small drone helicopter. With a mass of 2 kg, it is purely a technology demonstrator, to establish whether such a craft can, in reality, fly in Mars’ very thin atmosphere. Consequently, it carries no scientific payload. It was transported to Mars in the belly of the Perseverance lander, and subsequently deployed on to the Martian surface. Perseverance mounts Ingenuity’s base station, which stores and relays communications between the drone and Earth.
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