NASA Performs First Plane Accident Investigation on One other World

The assessment takes an in depth look the ultimate flight of the company’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which was the primary plane to fly on one other world.

Engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and AeroVironment are finishing an in depth evaluation of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s remaining flight on Jan. 18, 2024, which might be revealed within the subsequent few weeks as a NASA technical report. Designed as a expertise demonstration to carry out as much as 5 experimental check flights over 30 days, Ingenuity was the primary plane on one other world. It operated for nearly three years, carried out 72 flights, and flew greater than 30 instances farther than deliberate whereas accumulating over two hours of flight time.

The investigation concludes that the lack of Ingenuity’s navigation system to offer correct information through the flight doubtless precipitated a series of occasions that ended the mission. The report’s findings are anticipated to profit future Mars helicopters, in addition to different plane destined to function on different worlds.

Flight 72 was deliberate as a short vertical hop to evaluate Ingenuity’s flight techniques and {photograph} the world. Knowledge from the flight exhibits Ingenuity climbing to 40 ft (12 meters), hovering, and capturing photographs. It initiated its descent at 19 seconds, and by 32 seconds the helicopter was again on the floor and had halted communications. The next day, the mission reestablished communications, and photographs that got here down six days after the flight revealed Ingenuity had sustained extreme injury to its rotor blades.

“When operating an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black packing containers or eyewitnesses,” mentioned Ingenuity’s first pilot, Håvard Grip of JPL. “Whereas a number of eventualities are viable with the obtainable information, we’ve got one we imagine is almost certainly: Lack of floor texture gave the navigation system too little data to work with.”

The helicopter’s imaginative and prescient navigation system was designed to trace visible options on the floor utilizing a downward-looking digital camera over well-textured (pebbly) however flat terrain. This restricted monitoring functionality was greater than adequate for finishing up Ingenuity’s first 5 flights, however by Flight 72 the helicopter was in a area of Jezero Crater stuffed with steep, comparatively featureless sand ripples.

One of many navigation system’s most important necessities was to offer velocity estimates that may allow the helicopter to land inside a small envelope of vertical and horizontal velocities. Knowledge despatched down throughout Flight 72 exhibits that, round 20 seconds after takeoff, the navigation system couldn’t discover sufficient floor options to trace.

Images taken after the flight point out the navigation errors created excessive horizontal velocities at landing. Within the almost certainly situation, the exhausting influence on the sand ripple’s slope precipitated Ingenuity to pitch and roll. The fast perspective change resulted in hundreds on the fast-rotating rotor blades past their design limits, snapping all 4 of them off at their weakest level — a couple of third of the best way from the tip. The broken blades precipitated extreme vibration within the rotor system, ripping the rest of 1 blade from its root and producing an extreme energy demand that resulted in lack of communications.

Though Flight 72 completely grounded Ingenuity, the helicopter nonetheless beams climate and avionics check information to the Perseverance rover about as soon as per week. The climate data may gain advantage future explorers of the Crimson Planet. The avionics information is already proving helpful to engineers engaged on future designs of plane and different autos for the Crimson Planet.

“As a result of Ingenuity was designed to be reasonably priced whereas demanding big quantities of pc energy, we grew to become the primary mission to fly business off-the-shelf cellphone processors in deep house,” mentioned Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity’s venture supervisor. “We’re now approaching 4 years of steady operations, suggesting that not all the pieces must be larger, heavier, and radiation-hardened to work within the harsh Martian atmosphere.”

Impressed by Ingenuity’s longevity, NASA engineers have been testing smaller, lighter avionics that may very well be utilized in automobile designs for the Mars Pattern Return marketing campaign. The information can also be serving to engineers as they analysis what a future Mars helicopter may appear to be — and do.

Throughout a Wednesday, Dec. 11, briefing on the American Geophysical Union’s annual assembly in Washington, Tzanetos shared particulars on the Mars Chopper rotorcraft, an idea that he and different Ingenuity alumni are researching. As designed, Chopper is roughly 20 instances heavier than Ingenuity, may fly a number of kilos of science tools, and autonomously discover distant Martian places whereas touring as much as 2 miles (3 kilometers) in a day. (Ingenuity’s longest flight was 2,310 ft, or 704 meters.)

“Ingenuity has given us the arrogance and information to ascertain the way forward for flight at Mars,” mentioned Tzanetos.

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was constructed by JPL, which additionally manages the venture for NASA Headquarters. It’s supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Ames Analysis Heart in California’s Silicon Valley and NASA’s Langley Analysis Heart in Hampton, Virginia, offered important flight efficiency evaluation and technical help throughout Ingenuity’s improvement. AeroVironment, Qualcomm, and SolAero additionally offered design help and main automobile elements. Lockheed Area designed and manufactured the Mars Helicopter Supply System. At NASA Headquarters, Dave Lavery is this system govt for the Ingenuity Mars helicopter.

For extra details about Ingenuity:

https://mars.nasa.gov/expertise/helicopter

DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov

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