NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter made history as the first aircraft to fly on another planet. Designed to complete just five test flights over 30 days, it far surpassed expectations. Over nearly three years, Ingenuity completed 72 flights, flew 30 times farther than planned, and logged over two hours of flight time on Mars.
On January 18, 2024, Ingenuity’s final flight ended with significant damage, revealing the limitations of its navigation system. A detailed investigation by engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and AeroVironment is underway and will inform future Mars helicopters.
The final flight: a tough landing
Flight 72 was intended to be a short test to check Ingenuity’s systems and take photographs of the area. The helicopter climbed to 40 feet (12 meters), hovered, and began its descent. “By 32 seconds, the helicopter was back on the surface and had halted communications,” NASA reported. Images sent six days later showed severe damage to Ingenuity’s rotor blades.
“When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses,” said Håvard Grip, Ingenuity’s first pilot at 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.”
Ingenuity’s vision navigation system relied on tracking surface features with a downward-facing camera. It worked well on the flat, pebbly terrain of earlier flights but struggled over the sandy, smooth ripples of the Jezero Crater region. Around 20 seconds after takeoff, the system couldn’t find enough features to track, causing errors in navigation.
This led to a hard landing, with high horizontal velocity causing the helicopter to pitch and roll. “The rapid attitude change resulted in loads on the fast-rotating rotor blades beyond their design limits, snapping all four of them off at their weakest point,” NASA’s data showed. Excessive vibrations followed, severing part of one blade and causing a loss of communication.
Ingenuity’s continued contributions
Though grounded, Ingenuity continues to send valuable data to NASA’s Perseverance rover, including weather updates and avionics test results. This data is already proving useful for engineers developing future Mars technologies.
“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, suggesting that not everything needs to be bigger, heavier, and radiation-hardened to work in the harsh Martian environment.”
The future of Mars helicopters
Inspired by Ingenuity’s success, NASA engineers are designing larger, more advanced rotorcraft for future missions. One concept, Mars Chopper, would be 20 times heavier than Ingenuity, capable of carrying scientific instruments and exploring remote areas. It could fly up to 2 miles (3 kilometers) in a single day, far exceeding Ingenuity’s longest flight of 2,310 feet (704 meters).
“Ingenuity has given us the confidence and data to envision the future of flight at Mars,” said Tzanetos. Ingenuity’s groundbreaking mission proved that powered flight is possible on Mars, opening the door to new possibilities for space exploration. Its legacy will continue to inspire and inform future missions, ensuring the Red Planet remains within our reach.
Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS
