NASA Is About to Raise the Bar on What the Term Perseverance Means, Thanks to a Little... Ingenuity!

We truly are living in the sci-fi / sci-punk years.

With Starship flipping — and occasionally flopping — we have almost as much spacecraft-based excitement going on within our own atmosphere, as we do outside it.

Almost.

There can't be a soul left on this planet that hasn't by now heard what is likely to be one of the most significant pieces of extra-terrestrial news this year — the successful touchdown and safe landing of Percy (AKA Perseverance), Earth's latest robotic rover to be slung towards the red planet.

After seven long, cold months sat in confinement, Percy has made a safe touch down on the Martian surface, thanks to an intricate choreography of heat shields, parachutes, and the just mad-as-hell Sky Crane.

The Sky Crane forms the last leg in an incredibly complex, automated system that actively navigates the Martian terrain during descent, allowing Percy to placed precisely where it needs to be, to enable it to get busy as soon as system tests are done.

While only active for a few final seconds, this rocket powered hover-crane takes responsibility for gently placing Percy upon the planet, which the photograph below depicts — before yeeting itself off to a safe distance, to ensure it's final "energetic decomposition" does not engager any of the rover hardware that it has so delicately delivered.

Note that I said photograph. Not render. Despite the initial YouTube render from JPL earlier in the article, the image above is as real as they get.

Percy is packed to the teeth with all sorts of fun.

The Sky Crane means we can send bigger, more bulky robots to the red planet, enabling robots the size of a minivan to roam about the Martian planet, enabling us to pack Percy and others to the brim with new probes, photography equipment and much much more.

We bid adjure to the airbag "crash landing" days of Sojourner, and say hello to the future of many a complex exploration craft.

But the precious payload packed into Percy isn't limited to just photography equipment, oh no. In fact, Percy has a rather unique companion riding shotgun on this mission... If you know, you can just see it, hidden away in the image above.

Cant see it? Read on and all will be revealed.

With 19 of the full entourage of 23 cameras contained within the mission onboard Percy alone, and a further three in the landing stages, there is a final camera system that this article has yet to cover. So rather than risk droning on, we'll cut to the chase, Percy carries an Ingenious companion with it — the Mars Helicopter — AKA Ingenuity.

Helicopter? Hell yes!

At the time of writing, Percy has been sat on the Martian surface for about 15 and a half Sol's — the Martian equivalent to the Earthen "Day" — some 24 hours, 39 minutes 35 seconds long - give or take a second or so over the year.

Scheduled to take flight in approximately another 15 or so Earthen days, Ingenuity will be the first of its kind — that is, the first extra-terrestrial, atmospheric flight platform

What goes into Ingenuity?

The name of this extra-terrestrial electrical VTOL craft speaks for itself — it is the sheer embodiment of the word, owing to the challenges it is facing.

First up is the sheer physical difference in environments between our two planets.

With an atmospheric density of approximately 1% of that found here on Earth, it's still not guaranteed that Ingenuity will be able to take flight — it is after all, the first of its kind — a technology demonstrator that we all have our fingers crossed for.

The implications of this are that Ingenuity needs to be as featherweight as possible. This isn't your dad's DJI, that's for sure!

Carbon fibre tubes make up the crafts landing gear, and the same composite is used for the carbon fibre clad, foam core blades.

The entire craft barely tips the scales with a total system weight of 1.8kg — very impressive for a craft with a rotor span of 1.2 meters!

Latency — it's not just the bane of computer games...

There are a good many systems contained within the Mars Helicopter that enable such a craft to take flight, reliably, without us being there to keep an eye on it!

If you've ever flown a drone, you will know that it's not exactly something that happens without a significant amount of processing power — aimed at keeping the craft level and stable, so that our meat-stick fingers can feel like we are in control, when really all we are doing is instructing a complex flight control program to adjust its parameters.

We tell the drone to fly left, and it flies left. Magic, or at least close enough, eh?

Things are a bit different on Mars. The major difference in flying a drone here on Earth, compared to doing so on mars, is that such a flight system needs to be fully autonomous.

Why so? Well, Mars is anywhere from a long way away, to a very long way away — at the time of writing, Mars sits some 227.62 millionkm from our planet. At it's closest passing distance, we travel to within some mere 62 millionkm from our third closest neighbor.

The distance between our planet and the red planet means that radio signals can take anywhere from five to 20 minutes to travel from one surface to another.

Double that up for a round trip, and you can quickly see that "real time" control is not going to be a realistic expectation.

Autonomy is the name of the game

As if the concept of an automated drone, flying about waypoints on a foreign planet, a very long way away is seeming like the stuff of faked moon landings (Though I hope there aren't too many of those thinking that here in the crowd...), well, the entire flight control system is published for you to dig into.

Yup, that's right, NASA has published F-Prime on GitHub - meaning that we are free to fly through the code listings that make up the flight control systems that enable Ingenuity to take flight, free from our guiding hands, so very far away from us.

Resilience, redundancy and radiation, oh my!

We all likely recall the photo-shy Raspberry Pi 2 issues, with the WLCSP, flip-chip PMIC having a slight photo-sensitive nature.

With silicon circuits exhibiting the photo-electric effect, the interference from the EM spectrum isn't limited to visible light. Indeed, radiation across most of the EM spectrum has potential to wreak havoc with the internal running's of the rovers rotor-based robotic companion.

While f-prime doesn't appear to do any critical redundancy checking, Ingenuity is said to contain a conventional CPU, with a rad-hardened FPGA, that is used to keep tabs on the bits being flipped by the crafts processor - issuing important watchdog calls and dealing with any unexpected bit-flips due to errant radiation.

Although things like planetary orbiters and indeed Perseverance itself can afford the weight budget of the shielding required to keep radiation out, Ingenuity simply can not.

As such, it will be very interesting to dig into the hardware of the craft, should we get the chance, for some valuable lessons on how to achieve reliable autonomy in a radiation prone environment!

Front row seats to the first off-world Wright brothers moment of flight.

We've mentioned the myriad cameras packed onto Percy.

We've seen the incredible footage of the superb landing, carefully catered for by the Sky Crane landing system.

And soon, Percy will set its sights aimed at Ingenuity, watching from a safe distance, as this interplanetary multi-rotor hopefully takes to the blue and red Martian sky — a truly historic helicopter.

Perseverance and Ingenuity certainly look set to pay off.