Lessons learned from Ingenuity Mars helicopter will play into designs for follow-on craft | Global News Avenue

nearly a year later NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter After a long and highly successful mission, engineers have identified the most likely culprit: flying over a featureless sand flow where onboard sensors were unable to determine the helicopter’s direction and speed.

The result was a “hard” sideways landing on a steep slope, with Ingenuity’s rotors spinning too fast, spinning at nearly 400 mph to provide lift in the ultra-thin Martian atmosphere, but encountering structures Fault. One of them broke off and the others were severely damaged.

Ingenuity’s first pilot Håvard Grip said in an interview on Wednesday that since Ingenuity’s 72nd and final flight The results from Jan. 18 will be incorporated into the design of a more powerful Mars helicopter currently being studied at the Ingenuity-built Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“We’re very actively looking at what that might look like right now,” Gripp said in an interview. “We are developing this large aircraft concept with six rotors and 36 blades that can fly its own science payload around Mars. That’s our current focus in the helicopter space.”

On Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Ingenuity project manager Teddy Tzanetos discussed the hexacopter Mars Helicopter concept, a rotorcraft that weighs 20 times the Ingenuity and can fly up to 2 miles per day. Carry several pounds of scientific equipment.

Ingenuity “becomes the first mission to fly a commercial off-the-shelf mobile phone processor in deep space,” Tsanetos said in a NASA press release. The mission shows that “not everything needs to be bigger, heavier and radiation-resistant to work in the harsh Martian environment.”

In April 2021, Ingenuity was transported to Mars by NASA’s Perseverance rover and landed on the surface of the red planet. made its first flight Two weeks later. Ingenuity is being built primarily to see if helicopters can fly in the cold, thin atmosphere, and is expected to conduct five flights over 30 days as a proof of concept.

To the surprise of just about everyone, it completed 72 flights over nearly three years, repeatedly scouting ahead of Perseverance while logging more than two hours of flight time, and landing in close proximity before its final flight. A total of 10.7 miles flown at an altitude of 80 feet. January 18th.

On that flight, Ingenuity climbed to an altitude of about 40 feet, hovered and took photos of the surrounding terrain, and began its descent 19 seconds after takeoff. Thirteen seconds later, the helicopter returned to the ground but contact was lost.

Perseverance’s communications were restored the next day, and six days after the flight, the rover sent back photos showing severe damage to the helicopter’s rotor.

Flight controllers initially suspected that the Ingenuity had made a hard landing at a steep angle, causing its high-speed rotors to hit the ground.

But Gripp said the most likely scenario is that the helicopter was unable to determine its horizontal speed because it flew over nearly featureless sand and landed while moving sideways at speeds well above its design limits.

“We also landed on a steep slope, probably the steepest slope we’ve ever encountered on any flight,” he said. “The combination of the two fits well into our most likely scenario.

“When it touches the ground, it spins very quickly to align with the ground. This forces the helicopter to rotate in a roll and pitch manner, and because this rotor is stiff, the rotor has to follow or bank more.” Instantaneous reduction, which It will bring a lot of bending moment to the blade. “

These bending moments, or forces, are very large because the tip of the rotor moves so fast. The blade tip broke, throwing the rotor system out of balance. This in turn caused enough vibration to cause one rotor to snap off its roots. Gripp said none of the blades came into contact with the surface during the landing.

In another surprise for flight controllers, Ingenuity was parked on its landing legs, its small solar array pointing skyward. Although it could no longer fly, it continued to relay Martian weather reports to Perseverance last November when it finally moved too far to maintain a radio connection.

“I always imagined that a bad landing would end up causing something on the ground to shatter into 1,000 pieces,” Gripp said. “So the fact that it’s upright and talking to us was not a surprise to me at all.”