NASA seems to understand its target audience pretty well: up and coming scientists and engineers who will be around in coming decades for flights to the Moon and Mars.
To that end, NASA JPL teams have been providing a regular stream of content about the new kid on the block, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, an autonomous rotocraft with skinny legs that tips the scales at just 4 pounds with the spunk of a new puppy.
After five successful short tech demo flights over the past month, NASA released on Wednesday its latest audience-pleasing feature: an opportunity to see Ingenuity fly in 3D.
NASA even provided instructions on how to make your own 3D glasses. (NOTE: Some assembly required with access to red and cyan cellphane sheets.)
Engineers took the previously released video of Ingenuity from its third flight on April 25 and rendered it in 3D. NASA described it as “a bit like standing on the Martian surface next to Perseverance and watching the flight firsthand.”
The creation of the 3D version required engineers to take the frames of the original video and reproject hem in what is known as an anaglyph, an image seen in 3D when viewed through color-filtered glasses. An anaglyph works by superimposing images taken from two angles and the two images are projected in different colors,usually red and cyan. When viewed through the glasses, each of the images reaches each eye with the intended color and the brain then fuses the information into the perception of a 3D image.
The original video came from the Mastcam-Z imager aboard the Perseverance mast. Justin Maki, an image scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, led the team that stitched the images into a video. He started creating 3D images as a grad student for Sojourner, the first Mars rover, in 1997.
In the third flight, Ingenuity rose 16 feet, then flew downrange 164 feet and heading out of the camera’s view before returning and then sticking its landing. Flight 4 on April 30 took Ingenuity 873 feet and flight 5 on May 7 took the copter on its first one-way trip of 423 feet when it climbed to an altitude of 33 feet above a new landing field.
RELATED: Ingenuity Mars helicopter sets down at new landing site after successful fifth flight
Ingenuity has now advanced beyond a tech demo to an operations demo in which it will explore scouting and other functions for other missions. There could be as many as two more flights within the next month. Perseverance will now take center stage on Mars as it begins it main mission of finding rock and soil samples to collect for future analysis on Earth in hopes of discovering signs of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet. The first sample is expected to be gathered in July sometime.
NASA recently featured two of its researchers in a discussion about the similarities and differences between Ingenuity and Dragonfly, a helicopter planned for a mission to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, to leave Earth in 2027. Compared to the tiny Ingenuity, Dragonfly will be the size of car with the ability to fly tens of miles at a time powered by its radioisotope generator.
RELATED: Dragonfly drone to fly on Titan in follow-up of Ingenuity on Mars