Eleven months after the Ingenuity helicopter made its last flight on Mars, engineers and scientists at NASA and a non-public firm that helped construct the flying car mentioned they’ve recognized what in all probability precipitated it to crash on the floor of Mars.
In brief, the helicopter’s on-board navigation sensors had been unable to discern sufficient options within the comparatively easy floor of Mars to find out its place, so when it touched down, it did so shifting horizontally. This precipitated the car to tumble, snapping off all 4 of the helicopter’s blades.
Delving into the basis trigger
It just isn’t simple to conduct a forensic evaluation like this on Mars, which is often about 100 million miles from Earth. Ingenuity carried no black field on board, so investigators have needed to piece collectively their findings from restricted knowledge and imagery.
“While a number of eventualities are viable with the out there knowledge, we’ve got one we consider is most probably: Lack of floor texture gave the navigation system too little data to work with,” mentioned Ingenuity’s first pilot, Håvard Grip of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a information launch.
A workforce from NASA and an organization that makes a speciality of unmanned aerial automobiles, AeroVironment, began by trying on the terrain the place Ingenuity was working over throughout its 72nd flight, on January 18 of this 12 months. The helicopter’s navigation system tracked visible options on the floor utilizing a downward-looking digital camera. During its preliminary flights, Ingenuity was in a position to discern pebbles and different options to find out its place. But practically three years later, Ingenuity was flying in a area of Jezero Crater crammed with steep, comparatively featureless sand ripples.
