The first plane crash investigation on another planet

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, which took off on Mars for the first time on April 19, 2021, is the first flying vehicle to operate on another planet. This was truly a miracle and every flight exceeded the design team’s expectations. But on January 18, 2024, during the 72nd flight, the small helicopter had an accident and damaged the rotor, causing the flight mission to end.

Engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and AeroVironment are completing a detailed assessment of what went wrong that day, in what would be the first aircraft accident investigation on another planet. . The investigation concluded that the accident stemmed from a problem with the navigation system. Most likely, the system did not provide accurate data, leading to a chain of events that terminated Ingenuity’s operations, IFL Science reported on December 11.

During its final flight, the helicopter climbed 12 meters high, hovered in place and took pictures of the sandy ground below. At 19 seconds into the flight, Ingenuity began to descend. 13 seconds later, it was on the ground, but the propeller was damaged. The relatively bare ground probably had a negative impact. Without an object to track, the guidance system did not know the helicopter’s exact location, leading to a steep descent.

“When investigating a crash from more than 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) away, you don’t have any black boxes or witnesses. Although there are many possible scenarios with the current data, there is one “What we believe is the most likely scenario: The lack of surface texture causes the navigation system to get too little information to operate,” said Ingenuity’s first pilot, a Håvard Grip engineer at JPL. .

Even without the ability to travel, Ingenuity continues to send weekly updates on weather and avionics, which are critical to future vehicle design. Ingenuity initially planned to conduct only 5 flights in 30 days. It was designed from low-cost off-the-shelf materials and was only intended to demonstrate that such an approach was feasible. In the end, it operated for nearly three years, making 72 flights, flying 30 times farther than expected, while also going faster and higher.

“Because Ingenuity is designed to be low-cost while requiring massive computing power, we became the first mission team to bring a commercial mobile phone processor into deep space. We are getting there.” 4 years of continuous operation. This shows that not everything needs to be bigger, heavier and radiation-proof to operate in the harsh Martian environment,” Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity project manager. , said.

The results of the new investigation were presented at the American Geophysical Union Conference. At the conference, Tzanetos also shared details about Ingenuity’s potential successor: the Mars Chopper helicopter. This vehicle can carry several kilograms of scientific equipment and travel up to 3 km a day.