SCIENCE: Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) reported on the Mars Helicopter crash during the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday (Dec. 11). After traveling to Mars attached to the Perseverance rover, Ingenuity began a test flight campaign to prove that powered flight was possible in the thin Martian atmosphere. After operating for nearly three years on the Red Planet, Ingenuity crashed during its 72nd flight on Jan. 18, 2024, damaging a rotor that left it unable to ever fly again.
But after performing the “first aircraft test on another world,” Ingenuity’s mission managers at JPL say the helicopter could have a second life on the Red Planet. “We are very proud to report that even after the hard landing in flight, the 72 avionics battery sensors are all working, and she still has one final gift for us, which is that she will now continue to act as a kind of weather station, recording telemetry, taking pictures every single sol and storing them on board,” Teddy Tzanetsos, Ingenuity’s project manager at JPL, said during the team’s presentation at AGU.
JPL has spent months investigating Ingenuity’s accident, and determined that the helicopter’s navigation system had very little information to pick up because of the dull, monotonous texture of the Martian surface.
“This doesn’t mean that we’re able to figure out everything about the flight,” Ingenuity’s first pilot, Howard Gripp of JPL, said in his presentation today at AGU 2024. “Our conclusion is that we don’t have enough information to tease apart some of the details about the sequence of events surrounding the landing.” Griepp said that, although the team’s investigation is complete, it is not fully complete because of the great distance between JPL and Ingenuity’s final resting place.
“One of the things that makes it difficult to investigate is the relative lack of information,” he said. “The crash site itself, you know — it’s over 100 million miles [160 million kilometers] away. There are no black boxes, there are no eyewitnesses. We can’t walk in and touch anything, so we have to work with the little information we have.”
