Ingenuity Mars
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter suffered navigation system errors that left it unable to operate after its final flight on January 18, 2024.
NASA announced on Wednesday that it is completing an assessment of the helicopter’s final flight Ingenuity Marswhich took place on January 18th of this year. According to , this can be considered the first plane crash outside Earth.
The aircraft’s activities were terminated after 72 successful flights over the Red Planet over the last three years.
The accident happened when the Ingenuity team planned a short vertical flight to determine its location after the helicopter made an emergency landing on its previous flight on January 6.
After reaching a height of 12 meters, the aircraft projected its descent and, when there was only one meter left to reach the surface, lost contact with roverwhich works as a communications relay for the helicopter.
Communication was reestablished the following day, with images sent to Earth revealing damage to rotating propellers.
The research, carried out by engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and AeroVironment, concluded that the Ingenuity’s navigation system’s inability to provide accurate data during flight was the likely cause of the events that ended the mission.
“Although there are several viable scenarios with the available data, we have one that we believe is the most likely: lack of surface texture gave the navigation system very little information to work with”, said pilot Håvard Grip in a statement.
The helicopter’s vision navigation system is designed to track visual features on the surface through a camera that is pointed downwards.
This tracking capacity was enough to carry out Ingenuity’s first flights. However, on its last mission, the helicopter was in a region of Jezero Crater full of steep and relatively featureless sand ripples.
One of the main requirements of the navigation system was to provide speed estimates that would allow the helicopter to land within a small range of vertical and horizontal speeds. It turns out that, during the flight, the images show that, around 20 seconds after takeoffthe navigation system was unable to find enough surface features to track.
Some photographs taken after the flight indicate that these navigation errors created high horizontal speeds at the time of landing. The strong impact on the slope of the rippling sand caused Ingenuity to tilt and roll.
Consequently, the four rotating propellers broke due to a high load produced by the rapid change in altitude, which led to rotation beyond the limits.
The damaged blades caused excessive vibration in the propeller system, tearing the remainder of a blade from its root and producing excessive energy that resulted in the loss of communications.
Despite the accident, the helicopter continues to transmit meteorological and aviation test data to the rover Perseverance, once a week.
