First report of plane crash in another world

Dec. 11 () –

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter, the first aircraft on another world, suffered errors in the navigation system which left it inoperable after a final flight on January 18, 2024.

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are completing a detailed evaluation of what can be considered first plane crash outside Earth.

Designed as a technology demonstration to perform up to five experimental test flights over 30 days, Ingenuity was the first aircraft on another world. It operated for almost three years, performed 72 flights and flew more than 30 times farther than planned while accumulating more than two hours of flight time.

The investigation concludes that “the inability of Ingenuity’s navigation system to provide accurate data during flight “probably caused a chain of events that ended the mission.”

Flight 72 was planned as a short vertical jump to evaluate Ingenuity’s flight systems and photograph the area. Flight data shows that Ingenuity climbed to 12 meters in height, stayed aloft and took images. It began its descent at 19 seconds and, at 32 seconds, the helicopter returned to the surface and had interrupted communications. The next day, the mission reestablished communications, and images that arrived six days after the flight revealed that Ingenuity It had suffered serious damage to the rotor blades.

“When you’re conducting an accident investigation 100 million miles away, you don’t have black boxes or eyewitnesses,” he said. in a statement Ingenuity’s first pilot, JPL’s Havard Grip. “While there are several viable scenarios with the available data, we have one that we believe is the most likely: the lack of surface texture gave the navigation system very little information to work with.”

The helicopter’s vision navigation system was designed to track visual features on the surface using a camera looking down on flat but well-textured terrain (with pebbles). This limited tracking capability was more than enough to carry out Ingenuity’s first five flights, but on flight 72 the helicopter was in a region of Jezero Crater. full of steep and relatively featureless sand ripples.

One of the main requirements of the navigation system was to provide speed estimates that would allow the helicopter to land within a small range of vertical and horizontal speeds. Data sent during Flight 72 shows that, about 20 seconds after takeoff, the navigation system was unable to find enough surface features to track.

NAVIGATION ERRORS

Photographs taken after the flight indicate that navigation errors created high horizontal velocities at the time of landing. In the most likely scenario, the strong impact on the slope of the sand ripple caused Ingenuity to pitch and roll. The rapid change in attitude caused loads on the rapidly rotating rotor blades beyond their design limits.breaking all four at their weakest point, about a third of the distance from the tip. The damaged blades caused excessive vibration in the rotor system, tearing the remainder of a blade from its root and generating excessive power demand resulting in loss of communications.

Although Flight 72 permanently grounded Ingenuity, the helicopter still transmits weather and avionics test data to the Perseverance rover about once a week. The meteorological information could benefit future explorers of the Red Planet. Avionics data is already proving useful to engineers who They are working on future designs for aircraft and other vehicles for the Red Planet.

“Because Ingenuity was designed to be affordable while demanding enormous amounts of computing power, we became the first mission to fly commercial off-the-shelf cell phone processors in deep space,” said project manager Teddy Tzanetos. by Ingenuity. “We are now approaching four years of continuous operations, suggesting that not everything needs to be bigger, heavier and more radiation-resistant to function in the harsh Martian environment.”