NASA is about to publish the world’s first off-world aircraft accident investigation. Aside from making history, the report will help the agency plan ahead for the next generation of flying vehicles that will help humanity explore Mars.
NASA engineers only intended the Mars Perseverance Rover’s Ingenuity helicopter to complete a maximum of five experimental test flights over 30 days in 2021. The experimental vehicle, however, proved much more durable than expected. Over nearly three more years, Ingenuity ultimately flew 72 more times, racking up more than two hours of aerial travel and traveling 30 times farther than planned.
[Related: RIP Mars Ingenuity, the ‘little helicopter that could’]
The rotorcraft’s flying career ended on January 18, 2024, however, when a botched landing appeared to fatally damage its blades. But what caused Ingenuity to miscalculate its 72nd flight remained a mystery to NASA. Since then, a collaborative research team from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and AeroVironment have spent months analyzing the available evidence and data.
“When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses,” Ingenuity’s first pilot, Håvard Grip, said in the JPL’s December 10th report announcement.
Grip explained that, while there are now multiple possible scenarios given the data, the team believes one explanation is the likeliest for Ingenuity’s landing failure: The aircraft navigation system couldn’t properly calculate its flight trajectory from the sparse information provided by its camera while traveling over relatively smooth Martian ground.
Read the full article here
