NASA’s First Off-Earth Investigation: What Killed Ingenuity on Mars?

Engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and AeroVironment are completing an in-depth evaluation of the final flight of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter on January 18, 2024.

This review will soon be published as a NASA technical report detailing the helicopter’s remarkable journey as the first aircraft to make a powered flight to another planet and what happened on the fateful flight 72.

Originally designed as a technology demonstration, Ingenuity was expected to complete just five flights in a 30-day period. However, it far exceeded expectations, completing 72 flights over nearly three years and traveling more than 17.7 kilometers while accumulating over two hours of flight time.

The helicopter’s operational success has provided invaluable data for future aerial exploration of Mars and beyond.

WHAT KILLED THE INGENUITY HELICOPTER FROM MARS?

Investigation of Ingenuity’s final flight suggests that the failure of its navigation system to accurately track surface features led to a series of events that culminated in the end of the mission.

The findings are anticipated to inform the design and operation of future Mars helicopters and other alien planes.

Flight 72 was designed as a short vertical ascent to evaluate flight systems and capture images of the Martian landscape. The data showed that Ingenuity successfully climbed to 40 feet before initiating its descent.

However, it lost communication shortly after landing. Subsequent images indicated severe damage to the rotor blades, which it broke during landing.

Håvard Grip, Ingenuity’s first pilot at JPL, explained the challenges of conducting an accident investigation from such a great distance: “When you run an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses”.

The team concluded that the helicopter’s navigation system struggled due to the lack of surface texture in Jezero Crater, where it encountered steep undulations of sand that lacked visual features essential for tracking.

Navigation errors resulted in high horizontal speeds at touchdown, causing Ingenuity to throw and roll to land.

This hard impact resulted in the failure of all four rotor blades, which broke at their weakest points. The damage caused excessive vibrations and eventually resulted in a loss of communication with Earth.

INGENUITY CAN STILL WORK FOR 20 YEARS

Despite being permanently docked, Ingenuity continues to provide valuable data to the Perseverance rover about once a week. This information includes weather data that could help future Mars explorers and avionics data that is already helping engineers design new vehicles for Martian exploration.

Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity’s project manager, noted that mission inspired new innovations: “Because Ingenuity was designed to be affordable while requiring huge amounts of computing power, we became the first mission to fly commercial mobile phone processors into deep space.”

This approach has led to ongoing research into smaller and lighter avionics for future missions.

During a recent briefing at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, Tzanetos revealed concepts for a new Mars craft called “Mars Chopper”.

This advanced design aims to autonomously explore distant Martian locations while carrying scientific instruments—an ambitious step forward inspired by Ingenuity’s groundbreaking heritage.

“Ingenuity gave us the confidence and data to envision the future of Mars flight,” said Tzanetos, noting the impact of this pioneering mission on future explorations of the Red Planet.