It’s been nearly a year since the record-breaking Ingenuity helicopter broke a blade, ending the airborne ventures of the first powered, controlled aircraft to take flight on another planet.
Now, NASA engineers are investigating the rotorcraft’s final flight, to better understand the circumstances of its end.
Ingenuity broke records on Mars, with the Perseverance rover capturing mind-blowing video as it flew above the Martian surface.
That all came to an end in January 2024, and now, researchers are getting close to understanding how the helicopter broke apart.
On its final flight, the helicopter climbed to 40 feet (12 meters) above the Martian surface, but after 32 seconds, the chopper was back on the ground and communications had stopped.
Nearly a year has passed since the first powered, controlled aircraft to fly on another planet was put out of commission when the Ingenuity helicopter, which set a new record, broke a blade. In order to learn more about the circumstances surrounding the rotorcraft’s demise, NASA engineers are currently looking into its last flight.
On Mars, creativity set new records when the Perseverance rover flew over the planet and captured incredible footage. Now that it’s all over, in January 2024, scientists are beginning to figure out how the helicopter broke apart.
Over the course of its three-year tenure, ingenuity exceeded all expectations. To demonstrate that humans are capable of launching powered, controlled flights on other worlds, the helicopter came to the Red Planet as a technology demonstration. Following five test flights, the helicopter was used as a scout by the Perseverance rover on Mars as it investigated the dry Jezero Crater.
In the end, Ingenuity flew 72 times in almost three years of operation. After reaching a height of 40 feet (12 meters) above the Martian surface during its last flight, the helicopter returned to the ground after 32 seconds, and all communication was cut off.
In a statement, Håvard Grip, Ingenuity’s first pilot at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, stated, “You don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses when conducting an accident investigation from 100 million miles away.”. Although there are a number of possible outcomes given the data at hand, we think the following is the most likely: The navigation system had insufficient information to function due to the absence of surface texture. “”.
The team believes in-flight navigation errors caused “high horizontal velocities at touchdown,” based on post-flight photos, the release said. Simply put, Ingenuity probably pitched and rolled on a sandy Martian slope after a crash landing. One rotor blade detached entirely from the helicopter as a result of the blades snapping.
Ingenuity can no longer fly, but it still delivers weather and avionics data to Perseverance on a weekly basis. NASA engineers are using Ingenuity’s surprisingly long lifespan and comparatively low cost as a model to create a future Mars helicopter that could weigh 20 times more than Ingenuity and travel up to two miles (3 km) in a day, which is roughly 4–6 times farther than Ingenuity’s longest flight.
Teddy Tzanetos, the project manager for Ingenuity, stated in the same release, “We became the first mission to fly commercial off-the-shelf cellphone processors in deep space because Ingenuity was designed to be affordable while demanding huge amounts of computer power.”. As we approach four years of nonstop operations, it becomes clear that not everything must be larger, heavier, and radiation-hardened in order to function in the hostile Martian environment. “”.
