NASA thinks it’s discovered why the Mars helicopter crashed

Forward of a full technical report that’s anticipated to be launched within the subsequent few weeks, engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and AeroVironment have revealed what’s believed to be the reason for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s crash on January 18th, 2024. The craft’s imaginative and prescient navigation system, which was designed to trace textured options on the floor of Mars, was confused by a featureless stretch of rippled sandy terrain, leading to incorrect velocity estimates that led to a tough touchdown.

Counting on distant information, together with images taken after the flight, the investigators imagine that “navigation errors created excessive horizontal velocities at landing,” which almost certainly resulted in Ingenuity experiencing a “exhausting influence on the sand ripple’s slope,” inflicting it to pitch and roll.

NASA’s engineers initially assumed that Ingenuity’s spinning rotor blades had been broken after making contact with the floor of Mars through the crash. They now imagine they snapped off as a result of “the speedy angle change resulted in hundreds on the fast-rotating rotor blades past their design limits.” Part of one of many rotor blades was situated about 49 toes away from the craft’s last resting place.

Communications had been misplaced through the crash because of extreme vibration within the broken and unbalanced rotor system that resulted in an extreme energy demand. Nevertheless, regardless of being completely grounded, communications had been reestablished the following day, and Ingenuity “nonetheless beams climate and avionics take a look at information to the Perseverance rover about as soon as per week,” which NASA says “is already proving helpful to engineers engaged on future designs of plane and different autos for the Purple Planet.”

Initially designed to carry out solely as much as 5 experimental flights over the course of a month on Mars, Ingenuity operated for nearly three years and accrued over two hours of flight time throughout 72 flights.