NASA's upcoming technical report, set to explain the cause of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter's crash on January 18, 2024, marks the first-ever interplanetary aircraft crash inquiry. The findings may offer valuable insights for the development of future space helicopters.

Ingenuity, part of NASA's Mars 2020 mission, is a prime example of how overengineering can yield unexpected benefits. Initially carried to Mars by the Perseverance rover to demonstrate the feasibility of flying a helicopter on the Red Planet, it ended up surpassing expectations and achieving much more than its original mission.

Figure 1. The Ingenuity helicopter

Ingenuity's first flight on April 19, 2021, was initially planned to be a brief test, with only five flights over 30 Martian days. However, it exceeded expectations, completing 72 flights over more than two hours across three Earth years before crashing during its final mission. Throughout its journey, Ingenuity transitioned from a mere technology demonstrator to an essential asset for the Perseverance mission, serving as a reconnaissance tool to identify new locations for the rover to explore. Figure 1 shows The Ingenuity helicopter.

The question remained: what caused Ingenuity's crash? Why did the resilient 4-lb (1.8-kg) helicopter fail? Luckily, NASA's Mars mission was designed to transmit vast amounts of data not only about the planet but also about the spacecraft. Thanks to telemetry and images collected, NASA engineers were able to reconstruct the sequence of events leading to the crash.

What NASA discovered was that during its final short flight, Ingenuity quickly reached an altitude of 40 ft (12 m), where it hovered and took pictures for later analysis. However, just 19 seconds after takeoff, it began descending and crashed to the ground at the 32-second mark, cutting off communication with Earth. Mission Control was able to reestablish contact the following day.

Six days later, Perseverance sent images back to Earth, providing engineers with additional evidence to help determine what had happened to Ingenuity.

Ingenuity's rotors were destroyed in the crash, permanently grounding the vehicle. It took nearly a year to uncover the cause of the crash, which was challenging due to the accident investigation team being 100 million miles away at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The investigation revealed that Ingenuity had been operating outside the conditions it was designed for.

Ingenuity was built to navigate by tracking visual features on the ground, which worked well on the pebbly terrain near its landing site. However, on its final flight, the ground was flat, sandy, and covered with ripples, making it difficult for the helicopter's systems to track and estimate its descent speed. As a result, it crashed into one of the ripples at an angle, causing it to pitch and roll. The impact put excessive strain on the rotors, breaking all four and tearing one off so violently that it caused a power surge, knocking out communications.

"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 from JPL. "While multiple scenarios are possible with the available data, we believe the most likely cause was that the lack of surface texture gave the navigation system too little information to work with."

NASA notes that the investigation’s findings will help guide future interplanetary helicopter missions. One such mission is a larger, dedicated helicopter designed to explore Mars over a much broader area than a rover can cover. Though still in the concept stage, an even more ambitious mission has been approved to send a rotorcraft to explore Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.

Meanwhile, Ingenuity continues to contribute to science, now functioning as a weather station on Mars.

Source: NASA

Cite this article:

Janani R (2024), Air Crash Investigation Reveals Stunning Detail from 100 Million Miles Away, AnaTechmaz, pp. 141