NASA determines what went wrong during Ingenuity’s final flight

It’s been nearly a year since the Ingenuity helicopter broke records Break the bladeending airborne projects for the first powered, controlled aircraft to fly on another planet. Now, NASA engineers are investigating the helicopter’s final flight, to better understand the circumstances of its end.

Ingenuity broke records on Mars, where the Perseverance rover captured them Amazing video While flying over the surface of Mars. It all ended in January 2024, and now researchers are getting closer to understanding how the helicopter came apart.

Creativity has exceeded all expectations during his three-year tenure. The helicopter arrived on the Red Planet as a technology demonstration, if only to demonstrate humanity’s ability to launch powered flights on other worlds. After five test flights, the helicopter became an explorer for the Perseverance rover on Mars, the latter of which explored the barren environment of Jezero Crater.

Ingenuity eventually operated for about three years and conducted 72 flights during that time. On its final flight, the helicopter rose to 40 feet (12 meters) above the surface of Mars, but after 32 seconds, the helicopter returned to Earth and communications stopped.

“When you investigate an accident from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses,” Havard Grebe, Ingenuity’s first pilot at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at a news conference. He releases. “While there are multiple viable scenarios with the available data, we have one that we believe is the most likely: the lack of surface texture gave the navigation system too little information to work with.”

Based on images taken after the flight, the team believes that navigation errors during the flight caused “high horizontal velocities upon landing,” according to the statement. In other words, an emergency landing that likely resulted in Ingenuity teetering on a sandy slope on Mars. This severed the rotor blades, with one blade completely detaching from the helicopter.

Ingenuity is no longer able to fly, but still provides weather and avionics data to Perseverance on a weekly basis. NASA engineers are using Ingenuity’s relatively cheap cost and incredible durability as a blueprint for building a future Mars helicopter — one that could weigh 20 times heavier than Ingenuity and fly up to 2 miles (3 km) per day, about 4.6 times farther. One of the longest creative journeys.

“Because Ingenuity was designed to be affordable while requiring massive amounts of computer power, we become the first mission to fly commercial-off-the-shelf mobile processors in deep space,” Teddy Tzanitos, Ingenuity’s project manager, said in the same release. “We are now approaching four years of continuous operations, which suggests that not everything needs to be bigger, heavier, and radiation-hardened to operate in the harsh Martian environment.”

The innovation was the beginning of a hopefully fruitful investigation into the universe using powered and controlled aircraft. The Martian helicopter has gone beyond what was expected, and Set the stage For future drones poised to offer never-before-seen views of the worlds and moons that make up our solar system.