NASA has completed its first report on an off-world incident
The first ever off-world aircraft crash investigation is soon to be published by NASA. The report, which will make history as well as help NASA plan for the next generation flying vehicles to help humanity explore Mars, will also help them plan. The vehicle proved to be much more durable than anticipated. Ingenuity flew 72 times in nearly three years. It accumulated more than two hours and traveled 30 times further than expected. NASA has never been able to determine what led Ingenuity’s 72nd flight to be miscalculated. Since then, a collaborative research team from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and AeroVironment have spent months analyzing the available evidence and data.
“When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses,” Ingenuity’s first pilot, Havard Grip, said in the JPL’s December 10th report announcement.
Grip explained that, while there are now multiple possible scenarios given the data, the team believes one explanation is the likeliest for Ingenuity’s landing failure: The aircraft navigation system couldn’t properly calculate its flight trajectory from the sparse information provided by its camera while traveling over relatively smooth Martian ground.
[Related: RIP Mars Ingenuity, the ‘little helicopter that could’]
This graphic depicts the most likely scenario for the hard landing of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 72nd and final flight on Jan. 18, 2024. High horizontal velocities at touchdown resulted in a hard impact on a sand ripple, which caused Ingenuity to pitch and roll, damaging its rotor blades.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
JPL explains that the data review indicates that the helicopter’s tracking system started to fail about 20 seconds after the takeoff. The photographic evidence suggests that Ingenuity made computer errors which caused a high horizontal speed, exceeding the design limits for its rotors. The vibrations caused the remaining blade of the copter to be torn off by the vibrations. This caused the four blades on the copter to snap at the weakest points. After crashing, Ingenuity rolled over the sands for six days as an excess of power onboard drained its communications array. NASA had never anticipated that the helicopter would travel to this particular area of Jezero Crater in January. Instead of traveling over a rocky terrain covered in plenty of visual coordinating cues as originally designed, Ingenuity was forced to attempt handling a region with steep and comparatively featureless sand ripples.
Despite all this, Ingenuity isn’t totally dead. Engineers helped restore a link to Earth and the computer of the downed chopper now regularly sends weather and avionics data to the Perseverance Rover. This information may one day help astronauts reach Mars. The Mars Chopper Rotorcraft Project was unveiled on December 11th. It would have the ability to autonomously explore up to 2 miles of Mars each day, while carrying several pounds of equipment. For comparison, Ingenuity traveled about 2,310 feet on its longest flight.
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But scaling up isn’t always necessary. Engineers are working on smaller, lighter vehicles than Ingenuity, which weighs only four pounds and measures 19 inches tall. Teddy Tzanetos of Ingenuity, project manager, said that the aircraft’s longevity and achievements show just how durable tiny packages can be.
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