NASA skinnyks it’s figured out why the Mars helicchooseer crashed

Ahead of a filled technical alert that’s awaited to be freed in the next restricted weeks, engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and AeroVironment have discneglected what’s supposed to be the caparticipate of the Ingenuity Mars Helicchooseer’s crash on January 18th, 2024. The originate’s vision navigation system, which was depicted to track textured features on the surface of Mars, was perplexd by a featureless stretch of rippled sandy terrain, resulting in inright velocity appraises that led to a difficult landing.

Relying on far data, including photographs apshown after the fairy, the depictateigators suppose that “navigation errors originated high horizontal velocities at touchdown,” which most probable resulted in Ingenuity experiencing a “difficult impact on the sand ripple’s slope,” causing it to pitch and roll.

NASA’s engineers originassociate presumed that Ingenuity’s spinning rotor blades were injured after making reach out with the surface of Mars during the crash. They now suppose they snapped off becaparticipate “the rapid attitude change resulted in loads on the rapid-rotating rotor blades beyond their depict restricts.” A part of one of the rotor blades was findd about 49 feet away from the originate’s final resting place.

Communications were lost during the crash as a result of excessive vibration in the injured and unequitable rotor system that resulted in an excessive power insist. However, despite being finishuringly grounded, communications were reset uped the next day, and Ingenuity “still beams weather and avionics test data to the Percut offance rover about once a week,” which NASA says “is already proving advantageous to engineers laboring on future depicts of airoriginate and other vehicles for the Red Planet.”

Initiassociate depicted to percreate only up to five experimental fairys over the course of a month on Mars, Ingenuity functiond for almost three years and accumutardyd over two hours of fairy time atraverse 72 fairys.