Investigating an plane crash is not any easy activity right here on Earth. Imagine how way more troublesome it could be to diagnose a helicopter accident that occurred 69 million miles away with not one of the standard information current to assist. NASA needed to do exactly that after its Ingenuity Mars Helicopter suffered an accident on Jan. 18, 2024, that has since left it grounded in a crater on Mars. And now, after months of amassing information, the house company could have lastly discovered what occurred.
On April 19, 2021, the NASA Ingenuity Mars Helicopter made historical past by lifting off the Jezero Crater’s ground and changing into the primary plane to fly on a celestial entity aside from Earth. The helicopter was imagined to fly solely 5 experimental flights over 30 days to reveal that flight on Mars was potential. But it exceeded all expectations, conducting 72 flights over three years, setting all kinds of altitude data within the course of, ending with that early 2024 accident.
The wreckage of the Inguity Mars Helicopter as seen by the Mars Rover Perseverance. The helicopter is on the correct and the damaged rotor is roughly 49 ft away on the left.
The closing moments of the helicopter’s flight have been kind of a thriller at first. Ingenuity lifted off prefer it had 71 occasions earlier than. Then digital camera footage confirmed that it started initiating descent after simply 19 seconds of flight. By the time 32 seconds had elapsed, the helicopter was on the Martian floor once more and had halted communications. Six days later, the helicopter beamed again pictures that confirmed it had sustained extreme rotor-blade harm and would not have the ability to fly.
Read extra: NASA Ingenuity: Meet the girl launching a helicopter on Mars
Now, NASA believes that the navigation system was in the end in charge. The navigation system used the helicopter’s downward-facing digital camera to trace visible options on the bottom. During this closing flight, the helicopter was flying over a portion of the Jezero Crater that’s recognized for textured, featureless sand ripples. The navigation system was thus unable to seek out any appropriate floor options to trace for a touchdown.
From there, a number of issues went flawed. NASA says that the helicopter made onerous contact with a sand-ripple slope, inflicting it to pitch and roll. The sudden change in altitude was an excessive amount of for the rotor blades, and 4 of them broke off at their weakest factors. This brought about the rotor system to vibrate excessively, which ripped one of many blades clear off. Finally, the incident generated an extreme energy draw that brought about communications to fail.
NASA’s graphic depicts the almost definitely situation for the accident, through which Ingenuity landed onerous on a sand-ripple slope, inflicting irreparable rotor-blade harm.
“When working an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you haven’t any black packing containers or eye witnesses,” mentioned Håvard Grip, Ingenuity’s first pilot and analysis technologist at JPL Robotics. “While a number of situations are viable with the accessible information, we now have one we consider is almost definitely: Lack of floor texture gave the navigation system too little data to work with.”
Read extra: Watch NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity make first flight on one other planet
Lessons realized
Nobody anticipated Ingenuity to final so long as it did. Its flights gave researchers glorious aerial views of our pink neighbor. Even now, because it lies within the sands of the Jezero Crater, Ingenuity can not fly however nonetheless beams again climate and avionics information to NASA. The avionics information together with the flight information from Ingenuity’s 72 flights — mixed with Ingenuity’s unbelievable longevity — are serving to NASA develop smaller, lighter avionics for future plane on Mars.
“Because Ingenuity was designed to be reasonably priced whereas demanding large quantities of laptop energy, we turned the primary mission to fly industrial off-the-shelf cellphone processors in deep house,” mentioned Ingenuity challenge supervisor Teddy Tzanetos. “We’re now approaching 4 years of steady operations, suggesting that not every thing must be larger, heavier and radiation-hardened to work within the harsh Martian atmosphere.”
Tzanetos and his workforce are already engaged on one other Mars helicopter. It’s roughly 20 occasions heavier than the Ingenuity and is being designed to hold a number of kilos of science tools whereas autonomously exploring distant areas on Mars.
