NASA Details What Went Wrong In First-Ever Helicopter Crash On Mars
It's not too often that you see an accident report for a vehicle on another planet, but such is the case with NASA providing some preliminary details from "the first aircraft accident investigation on another world." The first by NASA, anyway, as who knows if some intelligent beings on a distant planet or solar system consider this sort of thing routine. Mulder and Scully, if you're reading this, care to comment?
In any event, NASA's referring to its Ingenuity Mars helicopter, which has provided some amazing shots of the Red Planet during its time of service. More shots than initially expected, actually -- the original expectation was for Ingenuity to last just a short time during its maiden voyage to Mars on April 3, 2021.
Billed as "the first aircraft on another world," NASA anticipated that Ingenuity would make no more than five test flights over a 30-day period. Instead, it survived the terrain for three years, and conducted 72 flights during that time. It also flew 30 times farther than NASA's engineers planned, logging over two hours of flight time before it made its final ascent and descent.
NASA says the final mission was supposed to be a "brief vertical hop to assess Ingenuity's flight systems and photograph the area." However, the mission lasted just 32 seconds before Ingenuity was back on the surface of Mars with communications lost between it and NASA.
Fortunately, NASA was able to reestablish communications with the helicopter. Unfortunately, images beamed back to Earth revealed that it had sustained severe damage to its rotor blades.
"When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses," said Ingenuity’s first pilot, Håvard Grip of JPL. "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."
NASA's engineers pored over photographs that were snapped after the helicopter's final flight, which suggested "navigation errors created high horizontal velocities at touchdown." This led NASA to determine that what most likely happened is a hard impact on a sloped sand ripple, which in turn caused the aircraft to pitch and roll.
Sadly, the rapid change in altitude put a bigger load on the fast-rotating rotor blades than they were designed to handle, and all four snapped off at their weakest points.
"The damaged blades caused excessive vibration in the rotor system, ripping the remainder of one blade from its root and generating an excessive power demand that resulted in loss of communications," NASA states in its preliminary report.
While Ingenuity will never take flight again (without being fixed in person, by Earth astronauts or a visit by friendly aliens), it's not being taken out of commission completely. Instead, NASA has given it a new job -- to provide weekly weather and avionics test data to the agency's Perseverance rover.
