NASA believes it understands why Ingenuity crashed on Mars

eleven months later Craftsmanship A helicopter made its final flight on Mars, and engineers and scientists at NASA and a private company that helped build the vehicle said they have identified the likely cause of its crash on the Martian surface.

In short, the helicopter’s onboard navigation sensors were unable to discern enough features on the relatively smooth Martian surface to determine its position, so when it landed, it moved horizontally. This caused the vehicle to roll and all four of the helicopter’s blades to break.

Dive deeper into root causes

It’s not easy to conduct such a forensic analysis on Mars, which is typically about 100 million miles away from Earth. Craftsmanship There were no black boxes on board, so investigators had to piece together their findings based on limited data and images.

“While multiple scenarios are possible based on the available data, we believe the most likely scenario is one in which the lack of surface texture provides too little information to the navigation system,” explain CraftsmanshipThe first pilot, Håvard Grip of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a press release.

A team from NASA and AeroVironment, a company specializing in drone manufacturing, first studied the terrain Craftsmanship On January 18 this year, the flight completed its 72nd flight. The helicopter’s navigation system uses downward-looking cameras to track visual features on surfaces. During the initial flight, Craftsmanship Ability to identify pebbles and other features to determine their location. But nearly three years later, Craftsmanship The plane flew over an area of ​​Jezero Crater that is filled with steep, relatively featureless sand ripples.