"The helicopter is safe and in good health," said
a statement, adding the rotorcraft had failed to transition to "flight
mode."
The team plans to attempt the flight once more on Friday at
10:46 am Eastern Time (1446 GMT) with data expected back at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory around three hours later.
The software issue is thought to be the same one that
delayed Ingenuity's maiden voyage, the first powered flight on another planet.
Initially scheduled for April 11, the historic feat occurred April 19.
The reason was a glitch associated with the aircraft's
"watchdog timer," which alerts Ingenuity to potential problems and
pauses its processes if it thinks it has detected an error.
Engineers made a coding tweak that allowed Ingenuity to
overcome the problem and transition to flight mode correctly -- but estimated
there was a 15 percent chance it would not work on each flight attempt.
"Today's delay is in line with that expectation and
does not prevent future flight," NASA said.
Since reaching Mars in February under the belly of the
Perseverance rover, the four-pound (1.8 kilograms) helicopter has made three
successful flights.
The last, which took place Sunday, saw it move faster and
further than ever before, with a peak speed of 6.6 feet (two meters) per
second. It covered 64 feet (50 meters) of distance.
Ingenuity's flights are challenging because of conditions
vastly different from Earth's -- foremost among them a rarefied atmosphere that
has less than one percent the density of our own and means it has to spin its
rotors at 2,400 revolutions per minute.
The Ingenuity technology demonstration will end in early May
to allow the Perseverance rover to return to its main task: searching for signs
of past microbial life on Mars.
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