Even in dying, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter helps us find out about Mars.
The small plane met the demise of its essential mission on 18 January 2024, after practically three epic years of flitting round within the skinny Martian environment, just like the piece of engineering marvel that it’s.
Its closing flight was each unhappy and triumphant: the helicopter was solely deliberate to fly 5 instances throughout a complete of 31 days, but managed a jaw-dropping 72 flights over the floor of the crimson planet.
The information collected throughout these flights advised us so much about Mars, and easy methods to navigate the challenges it presents for human exploration. And now, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and protection contractor AeroVironment are ending up their investigation.
This, too, is thrilling: it is the primary plane accident report ever performed for an additional planet, the gap to which introduced some distinctive challenges.
“When operating an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you haven’t any black containers or eyewitnesses,” says cybernetics engineer and roboticist Håvard Grip of JPL.
“While a number of eventualities are viable with the accessible information, we now have one we imagine is probably: Lack of floor texture gave the navigation system too little data to work with.”
Ingenuity’s 72nd, and closing, flight began usually. The little helicopter was supposed to only carry up, hover for a bit, take some images, and land once more – a routine outing to do some reconnaissance and check the helicopter’s techniques.
The first half went fantastic. Ingenuity powered up its rotors, lifted off, hovering at 12 meters (40 toes) for about 20 seconds whereas it took some images.
Its descent is the place issues went haywire, but it surely’s not fully clear how. About 1 meter from the bottom, Ingenuity misplaced contact with the Perseverance rover, which acts as a communications relay to Earth.
The pictures that got here again in after communications had been reestablished confirmed Ingenuity on the bottom with its rotors broken past restore.
After analyzing all of the accessible proof, engineers right here on Earth imagine that they’ve decided the basis reason behind the crash.
In order to navigate successfully, the helicopter was outfitted with a downward-facing digital camera that takes pictures of the Martian floor at a price of 30 frames per second.
The navigation system appears on the timestamp of every picture to know when it was taken, and makes use of this data to match what the digital camera sees primarily based on what it ought to have been seeing at the moment. If this does not stack up, the helicopter makes changes to its place, velocity, and perspective.
In order to do that, the digital camera picks out options on the floor of Mars, equivalent to pebbly textures or rocks (there are loads of rocks on Mars). But when the helicopter took off for its 72nd flight, it was in a sandy area of the Jezero crater comparatively devoid of floor options.
As we learnt in May 2021, when the helicopter all of a sudden spun uncontrolled, the seamless operation of this digital camera was essential to Ingenuity’s capability to gauge how briskly it needs to be touring. On that event, Ingenuity recovered.
In January 2024, the digital camera may discover no floor options to trace, that means that Ingenuity could not decide how briskly it needs to be descending. It hit the bottom a lot sooner than it ought to have. This in itself wasn’t the issue; it was what occurred subsequent.
According to NASA’s reconstruction, the laborious influence triggered the helicopter to pitch and roll, inflicting stress to all 4 rotors that made them snap at their weakest level, a few third of the size from the tip of every blade. This injury made the rotor system vibrate, which ripped out one of many blades fully at its root, overloading the helicopter’s electronics, and chopping communications to compensate.
The little helicopter that would will fly no extra. But its different devices are nonetheless operational, which suggests we nonetheless obtain information from it, each concerning the climate on Mars, and its personal gear. Both varieties of knowledge will profit the planning of future Mars exploration.
“Because Ingenuity was designed to be reasonably priced whereas demanding big quantities of pc energy, we turned the primary mission to fly industrial off-the-shelf cellphone processors in deep area,” says engineer Teddy Tzanetos of JPL.
“We’re now approaching 4 years of steady operations, suggesting that not every part must be larger, heavier, and radiation-hardened to work within the harsh Martian setting.”
The technical report on the crash needs to be launched within the coming weeks.
