6 February/March 2025 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Mission-critical info for uncrewed systems professionals Platform one US space agency NASA has published its accident report into the failure of its Ingenuity rotorcraft on Mars, showing early designs for its successor, writes Nick Flaherty. Ingenuity lasted 72 missions on Mars and flew 30 times further than intended. Engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and AeroVironment completed a detailed assessment of the final flight on January 18, 2024, in the first extraterrestrial accident report. The investigation concludes that the inability of Ingenuity’s navigation system to provide accurate data during the flight probably caused a chain of events that ended the mission. Flight 72 was planned as a brief, vertical hop to assess Ingenuity’s flight systems and photograph the area. Data from the flight shows the vessel climbing to 12 m (40 ft), hovering and capturing images. It initiated its descent at 19 seconds, and by 32 seconds the rotorcraft was back on the surface and had halted communications. The next day, communications were reestablished and images sent six days after the flight showed Ingenuity had sustained severe damage to its rotor blades. “When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any blackboxes or eyewitnesses,” said Ingenuity’s first pilot, Håvard Grip of JPL Robotics. “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 helicopter’s vision navigation system was designed to track visual features on the surface using a downward-looking camera over well-textured (pebbly) but flat terrain. This limited tracking capability could carry out Ingenuity’s first five flights, but by Flight 72, the helicopter was in a region of Jezero crater on Mars filled with steep, relatively featureless sand ripples. Data sent down during Flight 72 shows that about 20 seconds after takeoff, the navigation system couldn’t find enough surface features to track, leading to high horizontal velocities at touchdown, causing pitch and roll. The rapid attitude change resulted in loads on the fast-rotating four rotor blades beyond their design limits, snapping them off at their weakest point, a third of the way from the tip. 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. Although this permanently grounded Ingenuity, the helicopter still beams weather and avionics test data to the Perseverance rover about once a week. “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,” said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity’s project manager. “We’re now approaching four years of continuous operations.” The successor design, Chopper, is being developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Chopper would be about the size of an SUV with six rotors, each with six blades. It could be used to carry science payloads of up to 5 kg over distances up to 3 km per Martian day (or sol). Space NASA report on Ingenuity rotorcraft’s failure on Mars The Chopper next-generation Mars helicopter (Image courtesy of NASA)
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