![]() ![]() Scientists were understandably eager to make their plan for these regions and asked for advanced reconnaissance of Castell Henllys from the Ingenuity team. Perseverance planned to spend at least two weeks at Tenby, followed immediately by an exploration of two other planned locations just to the west: Castell Henllys and Foel Drygarn. The circumstances were far more favorable for Flight 48. While these images were provided to the science team in advance of the rover’s arrival, they were unfortunately of little practical value. The image the heli team was hoping to impress the rover science team with was hidden from view by just a few degrees. ![]() This difficulty came into play on Flight 47, with the attempted Tenby scouting images just narrowly missing the main area of interest. Features that are far away are invariably near the horizon, and thus close to the edge of the camera’s frame and difficult to capture reliably. Since the helicopter’s attitude (yaw, pitch, roll) naturally fluctuates in response to external factors during flight, features near the boundaries of the planned image are often left outside the actual frame. ![]() This narrow field-of-view allows the camera to take beautifully detailed images of the Martian surface but leaves little room for error in targeting. The field of view of Ingenuity’s Return to Earth (RTE) camera is pointed diagonally downward, capturing a relatively narrow range from slightly above the horizon to roughly 40 degrees below. Instead, the Ingenuity team attempted to image Tenby from a distance as the helicopter moved farther up the delta on Flight 47. This precluded any close-up scouting flights of Tenby, as they would require Ingenuity to fly over the rover’s path, presenting an unacceptable risk to both vehicles. As mentioned in a previous post, the team was looking forward to doing this yet again as the rover made the long ascent up the Jezero delta.įlight 46 had put Ingenuity within sight of the scientifically important Tenby region, but a number of minor issues delayed the execution of Flight 47, allowing Perseverance to catch up to the helicopter. In practice, this hasn’t always been possible, but Ingenuity has indeed proven its worth on more than a few occasions over the course of the mission. Even before the end of Ingenuity’s primary mission as a technology demonstrator, the helicopter showed that it could provide tactical and scientific scouting for the Perseverance mission. ![]()
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