It is the first of its kind: The Ingenuity helicopter on Mars exceeded all expectations as humanity's first flying vehicle on an alien planet. (Image source: jpl.nasa.gov)
On January 18, 2024, its mission ended in a crash. No one was killed, but a hero of humanity was left with severe physical limitations on the surface of Mars.
Ingenuity, the helicopter with rotors measuring around 1.20 meters, wrote itself into the history book with its first flight on April 19, 2021: It will forever be humanity's first flying machine on an extraterrestrial planet. At the beginning of 2021 he had previously reached our neighboring planet on board the Perseverance lander.
Now there NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) first details about the crash are known and it becomes clear: Ingenuity had no chance – but will continue to serve us on Mars.
Treacherous terrain as the cause
There are satellites orbiting Mars, but there is no navigation system available on the ground. Each vehicle must find its own way through or across the inhospitable and largely unknown terrain of Mars.
For this purpose, Ingenuity relied primarily on a downward-facing camera that determined speed and direction based on the changes in the surface being flown over. This worked quite well during 71 flights. But the 72nd start was to be his last.
The following course took Ingenuity over a landscape characterized by partly steep sand dunes. Based on the available data, NASA suspects that the ground looked so monotonous and simply the same that the helicopter could no longer determine its speed; a big problem because Ingenuity is designed to land as vertically as possible, i.e. with at best no movement to the left/right or front/back.
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When it touched down after about 20 seconds of flight, none of the rotors touched the ground, but the forces acting on the blades broke off a section of all four. In addition, one broke completely loose and flew several meters.
Afterwards, all systems failed for some time due to unexpected increased consumption due to the load. But Ingenuity came back to life thanks to its solar panels and has been communicating with Perseverance again ever since.
On the ground, but not idle
Although Ingenuity will never fly again, it continues its work stationary. As the JPL reports, the electronics, sensors, camera and batteries, including the connected solar panels, are largely intact. In the future, NASA wants to continue collecting weather data and taking images.
The heart of the helicopter is a commercially available processor, the same as that used in smartphones. So Ingenuity will be around for a while call home
. Only when Perseverance leaves communication range will the small helicopter remain in solitude. However, he will probably continue his work – but at some point people or robotic vehicles could make contact with humanity's first extraterrestrial helicopter again.
Engineers at JPL are also already working on the successor to humanity's little flying hero. A video on YouTube shows you today what the Mars Chopper could look like.
The premiere on Mars was a success in any case: Instead of the planned five short flights as a prototype over a period of 30 days, Ingenuity flew 72 times within three years and more than 30 times further than ever planned.
His outstanding success will have an impact for a long time, as Teddy Tzanetos, his project manager, says looking to the future with anticipation: Ingenuity has given us data and confidence to imagine the future of flight on Mars.
