Ingenuity, NASA’s Mars Helicopter, Crashes on January 18, 2024 Due to Navigation System Failure.
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter made its first flight on Mars on April 19, 2021, becoming the first aircraft to operate on another planet. This was truly a marvel, with each flight surpassing the expectations of the design team. However, on January 18, 2024, during its 72nd flight, the small helicopter encountered an accident and damaged its rotor, leading to the end of its flying mission.
Engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and AeroVironment are completing a detailed assessment of the issues that occurred that day, marking the first aircraft accident investigation on another planet. The investigation concluded that the accident originated from a failure in the navigation system. It is likely that the system failed to provide accurate data, resulting in a sequence of events that led to Ingenuity’s operational cessation, IFL Science reported on December 11.
Ingenuity helicopter (right) near the top of a sand ripple in an image taken by the Perseverance rover on February 24, 2024. A portion of the rotor lies about 15 meters to the west of the helicopter (left). (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS).
In its final flight, the helicopter ascended to 12 meters, hovered in place, and captured images of the sandy ground below. At the 19-second mark of the flight, Ingenuity began its descent. Thirteen seconds later, it was on the ground, but the rotor was damaged. The relatively barren ground likely contributed to an adverse impact. Without objects to track, the navigation system could not determine the helicopter’s exact position, resulting in a hard landing.
“When investigating an accident from over 100 million miles (160 million km) away, you don’t have any black boxes or witnesses. While there are many plausible scenarios with the current data, there is one scenario that we believe is the most likely: The lack of surface structure resulted in the navigation system obtaining too little information to operate,” said Håvard Grip, the chief pilot of Ingenuity and an engineer at JPL.
Although it can no longer move, Ingenuity continues to send weekly updates about weather conditions and avionics systems, which are crucial for designing future vehicles. Ingenuity was initially expected to complete just five flights over 30 days. It was built from readily available low-cost materials and aimed solely at demonstrating the feasibility of such an approach. Ultimately, it operated for nearly three years, completing 72 flights, traveling 30 times farther than expected, and also flying faster and higher.
“Since Ingenuity was designed with low costs while requiring substantial computational power, we became the first mission team to send a commercial mobile processor into deep space. We are approaching the four-year mark of continuous operation. This shows that not everything needs to be larger, heavier, and radiation-hardened to function in the harsh Martian environment,” said Teddy Tzanetos, the Ingenuity project manager.
The results of the investigation were recently presented at the American Geophysical Union conference. At the conference, Tzanetos also shared details about the potential successor to Ingenuity: the Mars Chopper. This vehicle could carry several kilograms of scientific equipment and travel up to 3 kilometers per day.
