Ingenuity, One Year of Flying on Mars

From Wright Brother’s Field out to South Séítah and Ingenuity’s subsequent mission traveling alongside Perseverance on its traverse to Jezero crater’s ancient river delta, this paper explores Ingenuity’s journey in the first year of its operational demonstration mission. Along the way, Ingenuity has scouted out the path ahead for Perseverance, imaged Perseverance’s backshell and parachute, and flown over 7 kilometers. With 33 completed flights to date, the team continues to push the vehicle’s limits and collect a rich set of flight and engineering data. Additionally, this paper will discuss Ingenuity’s loss of communication on sol 427, covering how the changing seasonal conditions caused Ingenuity’s survival heating to fail and the avionics to plunge below the designed operational temperatures in the Martian night. It will also discuss the process of recovering the vehicle, transitioning into low power winter operations, and returning to flight despite this anomaly, allowing the team to continue operating throughout the harshest environment Ingenuity has seen. Finally, it will detail vehicle and subsystem performance over the past year, as well as lessons learned from operating outside the bounds of the initial mission