NASA has finally revealed why its Ingenuity Helicopter crashed on the Martian surface in January, earlier this year. Engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and AeroVironment conducted the in-depth assessment and concluded that the failure of Ingenuity’s navigation system to provide accurate data “during the flight likely caused a chain of events that ended the mission”. As per the flight data, Ingenuity reached an altitude of 12 metres, clicked the images and returned to the surface after 32 seconds but the communication was severed. After mission command on Earth re-established the communication, it was discovered that Ingenuity had sustained damage to its rotors.
“When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses,” said Ingenuity’s first pilot, Havard Grip of JPL, adding: “While multiple scenarios are viable with the available data, we have one we believe is most likely: Lack of surface texture gave the navigation system too little information to work with.”
Ingenuity’s navigation system was designed to track visual features on the Martian surface using a camera over well-textured (pebbly) but flat terrain. During the fateful flight, Ingenuity was in a region of Jezero Crater that is filled with steep, relatively featureless sand ripples. The topography confused the helicopter and resulted in a hard impact which caused Ingenuity to pitch and roll.
“The rapid attitude change resulted in loads on the fast-rotating rotor blades beyond their design limits, snapping all four of them off at their weakest point – about a third of the way from the tip,” the findings stated.
“The damaged blades caused excessive vibration in the rotor system, ripping the remainder of one blade from its root and generating an excessive power demand that resulted in loss of communications,” it added.
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Down but not out
The Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity Helicopter were both part of the Mars 2020 mission that blasted off Earth aboard an Atlas V rocket. While Perseverance continues to work flawlessly, Ingenuity suffered a cruel end but not before it accomplished some major tasks.
Ingenuity was designed to perform up to five experimental test flights over 30 days but managed to operate for almost three years, performing 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 beams weather and avionics test data to Perseverance about once a week. NASA believes that the weather information may help future explorers of the Red Planet. The avionics data is already proving useful to engineers working on future designs of aircraft and other vehicles for the Red Planet.
