NASA JPL

Mars 2020 Helicopter mission ops

“Veritrek’s ROM has enabled more effective and efficient daily planning and operation of the Mars helicopter.” NASA JPL, TFAWS 2020

The NASA JPL Mars Helicopter team is currently using Veritrek to assist in day-to-day mission operations of the Ingenuity Helicopter’s daily flights. A reduced-order model was put together to rapidly correlate the Thermal Desktop model based on the previous day’s flight data and early morning telemetry data, so that the next day’s flight time and operating parameters can be put together in less than a day. Veritrek’s Correlation Analysis feature allows for the correlation of an analysis model to test data in just a few seconds, which is a drastic improvement upon on the standard manual guess and check method that was infeasible for this daily mission planning. Traditional methods would not be fast enough to keep up on a daily basis, which would lead to shorter/fewer flights and less science performed by the Ingenuity helicopter.

For model correlation purposes, the reduced-order model of the 2020 Ingenuity Helicopter needed to be extremely accurate. The plots above show testing that Veritrek performs on the created ROM to show its accuracy, and how well it is performing relative to the underlying Thermal Desktop model. The desired margin for the battery heater’s energy was 0.5 W*hr. The ROM was tested with 353 random design points and showed a mean residual in error from the underlying Thermal Desktop model of ~0.05 W*hr. The desired margin for component temperatures was 1°C, and the ROM’s mean residual in error from the underlying Thermal Desktop model was 0.02°C for the CAM_FORWARD component and less than 1°C for all 18 components of interest.