NASA is investigating what went wrong on Ingenuity’s last flight

It’s been almost a year since Ingenuity’s record-breaking helicopter broke a bladeending the first powered, manned aircraft ventures to fly by another planet.Now NASA engineers are investigating the rotorcraft’s last flight to better understand the circumstances of its end.

Ingenuity has set records on Mars, and the Perseverance rover is catching on amazing video when it flew above the surface of Mars. It all ended in January 2024, and now researchers are getting closer to understanding how the helicopter came apart.

Ingenuity exceeded all expectations during its three-year tenure. The helicopter arrived on the Red Planet as a technology demonstrator simply to demonstrate humanity’s ability to perform powered, controlled flights on other worlds. Crater’s arid environment.

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

“When you’re conducting an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or witnesses,” said Howard Gripp, first pilot of Ingenuity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. release. “While many scenarios are viable with the available data, we have one that we believe is the most likely; The lack of surface texture gave the navigation system very little information to work with.”

Based on post-flight photos, the team believes in-flight navigational errors caused “high horizontal velocities at touchdown,” in other words, a crash landing that likely caused Ingenuity to pitch and roll into the sand. on the Martian slope. It tore off the rotor blades, one blade of which completely separated from the helicopter.

Ingenuity can no longer fly, but it still provides weather and avionics data to Perseverance on a weekly basis. which can weigh 20 times as much as Ingenuity and fly up to two miles (3 km) a day, about 4.6 times farther. than Ingenuity’s longest flight.

“Because Ingenuity was designed to be affordable while requiring massive amounts of computing power, we became the first mission to fly commercial phone processors into deep space,” Ingenuity project manager Teddy Tsanetos said in the same release we’re approaching four years of continuous operation, suggesting that not everything needs to be bigger, heavier, and radiation-hardened to work in the harsh Martian environment.”

Ingenuity was the start of a desperately efficient exploration of space using powered, manned aircraft.The Martian helicopter went beyond expectations and stage for future drones poised to capture never-before-seen views of the worlds and moons that make up our solar system.