NASA has finally revealed why its Ingenuity helicopter crashed on the surface of Mars earlier in January this year. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and AeroVironment conducted a thorough evaluation and concluded that “the failure of Ingenuity’s navigation system to provide accurate data during flight likely led to a series of events that terminated the mission”. . According to flight data, Ingenuity reached a height of 12 metres, clicked pictures and returned to the surface after 32 seconds but lost communication. After Mission Command on Earth reestablished communications, it was discovered that Ingenuity had damaged its rotors.
“When investigating a crash from 100 million miles away, you have no black box or eyewitnesses,” said JPL’s Howard Gripp, Ingenuity’s first pilot: “Although many scenarios are feasible with the available data, We have one we believe is most likely: the lack of surface texture gave the navigation system too little information to work with.”
Ingenuity’s navigation system was designed to track visible features on the surface of Mars using a camera on well-textured (pebbly) but flat terrain. During the fatal flight, Ingenuity was in an area of Jezero Crater that is filled with steep, relatively featureless sand waves. The topography confused the helicopter and resulted in a forceful collision that caused Ingenuity to deflate and roll over.
“The rapid attitude change resulted in loads on the fast-spinning rotor blades exceeding their design limits, causing all four of them to break at their weakest point – about a third of the way from the tip,” the findings said “
“The damaged blades caused excessive vibration in the rotor system, causing the remaining part of one blade to become detached from the root and create excessive power demand resulting in loss of communications,” it said.
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down but not out
Both the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter were part of the Mars 2020 mission that launched from Earth aboard an Atlas V rocket. While Perseverance continues to operate flawlessly, Ingenuity suffered a brutal end, but not before completing some key tasks.
Ingenuity was designed to conduct five experimental test flights over 30 days, but it managed to operate for almost three years, making 72 flights and flying 30 times farther than planned. The inaugural Ingenuity flight took place on April 19, 2021, when the 1.8-kilogram flying object took off using its two counter-rotating blades.
Despite being grounded, Ingenuity still sends weather and avionics test data to Perseverance once a week. NASA believes the weather information could help future explorers of the Red Planet. Avionics data is already proving useful to engineers working on future designs of aircraft and other vehicles for the Red Planet.
