Ingenuity helicopter by NASA got through a “stressful” glitch in the navigation that sent the aircraft oscillating off track during a flight on Mars. It was on last Saturday that the helicopter took its sixth test flight before the peculiarity occurred that led the chopper to take an unexpected detour, said the engineers at NASA on Thursday, ABC News reports.

Also read | New map shows dark matter slightly smoother, more spread out in universe

Ingenuity landed safely, but oddly, during the mid-flight, it began “adjusting its velocity and tilting back and forth in an oscillating pattern”, said Harvard Grip, the chief pilot for Ingenuity at JPL. The chopper, the first controlled and powered aircraft to fly into another planet, was at an altitude of 33 feet when the oddity began, which carried on for the rest of the flight, ABC News reports.

Grip said that they have since found out what caused the glitch. “This glitch caused a single image to be lost, but more importantly, it resulted in all later navigation images being delivered with inaccurate timestamps”, he said. “From this point on, each time the navigation algorithm performed a correction based on a navigation image, it was operating on the basis of incorrect information about when the image was taken”, quoted ABC News.

Also read | Elon Musk and Mars: Challenges in the space adventure

In spite of the glitch, the chopper landed safely within around 16 feet of its intended landing area. Grip attributed the landing to the aircraft’s system that ensured its stability for functioning rightly at the right time. “In a very real sense, Ingenuity muscled through the situation, and while the flight uncovered a timing vulnerability that will now have to be addressed, it also confirmed the robustness of the system in multiple ways”, he said, quoted ABC News.