The biggest piece of news this update is the continual long-running update from the previous two articles, namely, Ingenuity has once again blown through a test date due to technical difficulties. This time anomalous readings were discovered before Ingenuity’s April 11 flight test which forced the flight crew to ground the test and go over the diagnostic readings. Ingenuity needed an additional software update to fly in the thin atmosphere of Mars and the flight system itself needed an update to assure flight data for flying in the Martian atmosphere represents Mars. So scientists will now once again go over all aspects of the test pre-flight data however as that date has already been moved up a couple of times we’ll just wait and see what happens in the coming days and possibly weeks.
If you’ve ever had the chance to peruse the NASA website one of the links or areas I peruse regularly is the NASA Image of the Day Galleries. These are pictures that are updated daily with captions and sometimes interesting stories attached. There’s also a Downloads link with tons of programs for IOS and Android for interacting with the NASA web site, various tools, and programs to monitor space and various missions, and of course, the Missions link which is the area of the NASA.gov website I personally use to bring you the latest in Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover mission and prelude for the upcoming Artemis missions.
So while we wait for the NASA engineers and the Ingenuity Flight team, in particular, to work out all the kinks and get all the proper software updates to the helicopter so we can see it fly we’ll await their best judgment for the green light. I personally think it might be a case of nerves which may have gotten worse now with 2 major delays on publically announced test runs which were ultimately canceled. I’m sure they’re just making sure everything is all right and from what I understand about NASA policy there’s always room for delays if it impacts science or our astronauts and engineers so if more time is needed to make sure things go smoothly, more time is what they will get. So we’ll eagerly await NASA’s next update on Ingenuity and hopefully, she will take flight soon.
Perseverance Selfie with Ingenuity helicopter in background.