NASA engineers are assessing the final flight of a helicopter on Mars.
Ingenuity Mars Helicopter made its final flight on 18 January 2024, ending a three-year stint on the Red Planet that saw it perform 72 flights, fly 30 times farther than planned and accumulate over two hours of flight time.
Ingenuity's goal was to test out the capabilities of a helicopter on Mars, to inform future scientific missions on the planet.
What NASA found
"The inability of Ingenuity’s navigation system to provide accurate data during the flight likely caused a chain of events that ended the mission," NASA says.
"When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses," says Ingenuity’s first pilot, Håvard Grip of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"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."
The Ingenuity helicopter had an inbuilt navigation system to track features on the surface of Mars.
NASA says its downward-looking camera was sufficient for the helicopter's first five flights, but by Flight 72 it showed "limited tracking capability" because the helicopter was in a region of Jezero Crater with steep, featureless sand ripples.
Data sent during Flight 72 shows that shortly after takeoff, the helicopter couldn't locate enough surface features to enable it to navigate.
NASA says Ingenuity likely experienced a hard impact on a sloped surface, causing its rotor blades to snap off.
Damaged blades then caused "excessive vibration" in the rotor system, breaking one blade entirely from the body of the helicopter and generating an excessive power demand that resulted in loss of communications.
Data still incoming
Despite the fact that Ingenuity can no longer fly, it's still sending weather and avionics test data to NASA's Perseverance rover which, NASA says, could benefit future explorers of the Red Planet.
"Because Ingenuity was designed to be affordable while demanding huge amounts of computer power, we became the first mission to fly commercial off-the-shelf cellphone processors in deep space," says Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity’s project manager.
"We’re now approaching four years of continuous operations, suggesting that not everything needs to be bigger, heavier, and radiation-hardened to work in the harsh Martian environment."
Ingenuity's legacy
NASA engineers are now testing smaller, lighter craft that could be used for the Mars Sample Return campaign.
And data from the tests is enabling engineers to decide what a future Mars helicopter could look like and do.
One such design is the 'Mars Chopper' rotorcraft, 20 times heavier than Ingenuity that could fly several pounds of science equipment and explore remote Martian locations, traveling up to 2 miles (3 kilometres) in a day.
"Ingenuity has given us the confidence and data to envision the future of flight at Mars," says Tzanetos.
