Ingenuity Mars Helicopter January Grounding: What Happened?
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
It appears the bland Martian surface triggered a chain of events that left NASA's Ingenuity helicopter permanently grounded on the red planet.
The helicopter's flying career came to an abrupt end earlier this year when Flight 72 was cut short, and communications were briefly lost. After re-establishing contact, it soon became clear Ingenuity would not be flying again - the rotor blades were damaged, and one was entirely detached.
At the time, the prevailing theory was that the flight ended when Ingenuity's downward-facing camera could not pick out features on the surface. According to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), this is still the most likely scenario for what started a chain of events that left the helicopter crippled.
[...] "Photographs taken after the flight indicate the navigation errors created high horizontal velocities at touchdown," according to JPL. Engineers reckon the most likely scenario is that Ingenuity made a hard landing on the slope of a sand ripple. The sudden pitch and roll exerted stress on the rotor blades past their design limits, and all four snapped at their weakest point. The damage caused vibration in the rotor system, which ripped off one blade entirely.
[...] Engineers are working on follow-ups to Ingenuity. During the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting, Tzanetos shared details on the Mars Chopper rotorcraft, which would be approximately 20 times heavier than Ingenuity and could fly science equipment over Mars, traveling autonomously for up to two miles in a day.
Tzanetos said: "Ingenuity has given us the confidence and data to envision the future of flight at Mars."
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