11 months later, ingenuity A helicopter has made its final flight on Mars, and NASA engineers and scientists, as well as the private company that helped build the vehicle, announced they have determined what may have caused the helicopter to crash onto the Martian surface.
This means that the helicopter’s navigation sensors were unable to recognize and locate Mars’ relatively smooth surface features, so it moved horizontally during landing. This caused the vehicle to overturn and all four of the helicopter’s blades tore off.
Dig into the root cause
Normally, conducting such forensic analysis on Mars, which is about 100 million miles from Earth, is not easy. ingenuity There were no black boxes on board, so investigators had to piece together their findings from limited data and images.
“Multiple scenarios are possible with the available data, but one seems most likely: the lack of surface texture leaves too little information for navigation systems to work with. ” said ingenuityNASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Harvard Gripp, the first pilot to do so, said in a news release.
The team from NASA and AeroVironment, a company specializing in unmanned aerial vehicles, started by looking at the terrain on which Earth lies. ingenuity The aircraft ceased operations on January 18 of this year, during its 72nd flight. The helicopter’s navigation system used a downward-facing camera to track visual features on the ground. During the first flight, ingenuity We were able to identify and locate pebbles and other features. But nearly three years have passed since then. ingenuity was flying over an area of Jezero Crater, filled with steep, relatively featureless sand ripples.
