The Ingenuity helicopter flew on Mars for an incredible 72 flights. Now, NASA has shared findings of why the mission came to an end.
Earlier this year, the NASA helicopter Ingenuity came to the end of its mission after an incredible 72 flights on Mars . The helicopter flew a remarkable 30 times farther than planned, and was the first rotocopter to fly on another planet, proving that exploring distant worlds from the air is possible. Now, NASA has revealed new details about what exactly caused the crash that brought the mission to an end, and what it learned about flying helicopters for future missions.
Recommended Videos “When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses,” said Ingenuity’s first pilot, Håvard Grip of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “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.
Related Further investigation found that the likely problem was that Ingenuity hit the surface too hard, then pitched to one side and rolled over. That meant weight was put onto the very light and delicate rotor blades, causing all four of them to snap at the tips. That created vibrations in the system, which ripped one blade off its mast completely.
“Because Ingenuity was designed to be affordable while demanding huge amounts of computer power, we became the first mission to fly commercial off-the-shelf cellphone processors in deep space,” said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity’s project manager. “We’re now approaching four years of continuous operations, suggesting that not everything needs to be bigger, heavier, and radiation-hardened to work in the harsh Martian environment.
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