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NASA releases 3D video of Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flight

The Mastcam-Z-instrument, which is a zoomable dual camera on Perseverance, produced a video that has been rendered in 3-D by NASA’s scientists.

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In April, NASA’s Ingenuity rotorcraft made history when it completed its first controlled, powered flight on the Red Planet. It had left on July 30 inside the rover Perseverance, landing on Mars’s Jezero crater. In April, the rover had set free the helicopter to soak up sunlight and charge its battery.

The Mastcam-Z-instrument, which is a zoomable dual camera on Perseverance, produced a video that has been rendered in 3-D by NASA’s scientists.

“When NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter took to the Martian skies on its third flight on April 25, the agency’s Perseverance rover was there to capture the historic moment. Now NASA engineers have rendered the flight in 3D, lending dramatic depth to the flight as the helicopter ascends, hovers, then zooms laterally off-screen before returning for a pinpoint landing,” the agency said.

The rover’s main mission is to hunt for fossils of ancient microbes. The Mastcam-Z captured images of the rocks on the planet, which the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California is trying to examine and classify as sedimentary, igneous, or formed by volcanic activity. "This is the first time we've seen the algorithm for the camera running over a long distance," said MiMi Aung, the helicopter's project manager at JPL. "You can't do this inside a test chamber."

JPL imaging scientist Justin Maki led the team which has put together the video of the helicopter’s flight. The team has re-projected to optimise the frames of the video to view in an anaglyph or image seen in 3D when viewed in colored filtered glasses. 

Maki said. “To be reusing this capability on a new mission by acquiring a 3D video of a helicopter flying above the surface of Mars is just spectacular.” The videos of the helicopter are the most extensive 3D video yet from the Mastcam-Z team.

Ingenuity's only purpose was to simply demonstrate that rotorcraft technology is possible on the planet’s terrain. It has certainly outdone itself. The rotorcraft will now be moving from pure technology demonstration mode to ambitious missions like aerial scouting to gauge the planet’s terrain. "The Ingenuity technology demonstration has been a resounding success," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for Nasa's Science Mission Directorate in a statement. "Since Ingenuity remains in excellent health, we plan to use it to benefit future aerial platforms while prioritizing and moving forward with the Perseverance rover team's near-term science goals."

With helicopters like Ingenuity, it would be possible to study and cover vast regions of the planet, which a rover cannot access.

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