It’s been nearly a year since the record-breaking Ingenuity helicopter broke a blade, ending the airborne ventures of the first powered, controlled aircraft to take flight on another planet. Now, NASA engineers are investigating the rotorcraft’s final flight, to better understand the circumstances of its end.
Ingenuity broke records on Mars, with the Perseverance rover capturing mind-blowing video as it flew above the Martian surface. That all came to an end in January 2024, and now, researchers are getting close to understanding how the helicopter broke apart.
Ingenuity surpassed all expectations during its three-year tenure. The helicopter arrived on the Red Planet as a technology demonstrator—merely to showcase the ability for humankind to launch powered, controlled flights on other worlds. After five test flights, the helicopter became a scout for the Perseverance rover on Mars, as the latter explored the arid environment of Jezero Crater.
Ingenuity ultimately operated for nearly three years and performed 72 flights over that span. On its final flight, the helicopter climbed to 40 feet (12 meters) above the Martian surface, but after 32 seconds, the chopper was back on the ground and communications had stopped.
“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 NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a release. “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.”
Based on photographs taken after the flight, the team believes that in-flight navigation errors caused “high horizontal velocities at touchdown,” according to the release. In other words, a crash landing that likely made Ingenuity pitch and roll on a sandy Martian slope. That snapped the rotor blades, with one blade completely separating from the helicopter.
Ingenuity can no longer fly, but it still delivers weather and avionics data to Perseverance on a weekly basis. NASA engineers are using Ingenuity’s relatively cheap cost and surprising durability as a blueprint on which to build a future Mars helicopter—one that could weigh 20 times heavier than Ingenuity and fly up to two miles (3 km) in a day, about 4.6 times farther than Ingenuity’s longest flight.
“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, in the same release. “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.”
Ingenuity was the beginning of a hopefully fruitful investigation of the cosmos using powered, controlled aircraft. The Martian helicopter went beyond what was expected, and set the stage for future drones poised to provide never-before-seen views of the worlds and moons that make up our solar system.