The intrepid Mars helicopter broke down in January 2024, and the space agency now knows why.
, ending the airborne ventures of the first powered, controlled aircraft to take flight on another planet. Now, NASA engineers are investigating the rotorcraft’s final flight, to better understand the circumstances of its end.as it flew above the Martian surface. That all came to an end in January 2024, and now, researchers are getting close to understanding how the helicopter broke apart.
Ingenuity ultimately operated for nearly three years and performed 72 flights over that span. On its final flight, the helicopter climbed to 40 feet above the Martian surface, but after 32 seconds, the chopper was back on the ground and communications had stopped. “When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses,” said Håvard Grip, Ingenuity’s first pilot at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a. “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 can no longer fly, but it still delivers weather and avionics data to Perseverance on a weekly basis. NASA engineers are using Ingenuity’s relatively cheap cost and surprising durability as a blueprint on which to build a future Mars helicopter—one that could weigh 20 times heavier than Ingenuity and fly up to two miles in a day, about 4.6 times farther than Ingenuity’s longest flight.
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