Lessons From Ingenuity’s Climb Up Jezero Crater Delta

As Perseverance began exploring the delta of Jezero crater, the Ingenuity team took on the most ambitious flights of the mission to date. Designed for the relatively flat terrain of the crater floor, the Ingenuity team now needed to climb up and fly through the rocky channels of the Jezero delta. Before the flights in the delta could even be attempted, the team needed to upgrade Ingenuity’s flight software to identify landing hazards and utilize digital elevation maps in the navigation filter. After upgrading the flight software, the team needed to work through a series of checkout flights to validate this new functionality prior to climbing the delta. The Jezero delta features narrow channels, limiting Ingenuity and Perseverance’s available traverse paths. This required Ingenuity and Perseverance to follow similar routes, necessitating new processes for coordinating Ingenuity and Perseverance’s parallel flights and drives. In previous traverses, Ingenuity was able to take separate, shorter routes to the destination, but this climb required Ingenuity to keep pace with Perseverance’s record setting drives. This rapid traverse pushed the Ingenuity team to optimize the flight planning process to shorten the nominal two week flight cadence to under a week between flights. The narrow passages of the delta also limited Ingenuity’s telecom propagation, providing only small windows of strong communication with Perseverance. All these above constraints required the Perseverance and Ingenuity teams to carefully orchestrate both vehicles’ journey up the delta, keeping both vehicles in lockstep while minimizing the chance that one vehicle would hold up the other’s progress. The paper will cover flight 34 and beyond, Ingenuity’s delta climb, as well as the lessons learned from both the challenging flights in the delta terrain and the required multi-vehicle coordination of the climb.¹²