NASA announced Thursday that the Mars robotic helicopter Ingenuity, the first vehicle to achieve powered, controlled flight on another world, will be permanently grounded after dozens of flights over three years, far exceeding all expectations. announced the completion of a ground-breaking mission.
NASA officials said Ingenuity's fate was determined by images returned to Earth after its 72nd final flight on January 18, in which one of the tiny whirligig's twin rotor blades broke off, rendering further operations impossible. announced that it has been shown that it is possible.
“It's bittersweet that we have to announce that Ingenuity, the 'little helicopter that can do it,' has made its final flight to Mars, even though we kept saying, 'I think we can do it, we think we can do it.'” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a video posted to social media.
What was planned as a technology demonstration of no more than five short flights over 30 days exceeded the expectations of the engineers who designed and built the helicopter at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles. It became.
In the end, Ingenuity flew over Martian terrain 14 times farther than originally planned, clocking a flight time of more than 2 hours and 8 minutes, and covering a distance of 16.5 miles in a total of 72 flights. The highest altitude he reached was measured at 78.7 feet.
The rotorcraft was strapped to the belly of NASA's Perseverance spacecraft and transported to the Red Planet. The rover landed at the bottom of a vast Martian basin called Hereso Crater three years ago on a separate mission, primarily to collect surface samples for eventual return to Earth. .
Martian Wright Brothers Moment
When the 4-pound rotor plane made its modest debut takeoff and landing (39 seconds of flight) in Mars' thin atmosphere on April 19, 2021, it was hailed as a landmark feat in interplanetary aviation.
NASA likened Ingenuity's feat at Hereso to the Wright brothers' historic first controlled flight of a motorized airplane near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903.
Over time, JPL continued to send the helicopter on increasingly ambitious flights and improved its capabilities.
According to Teddy Tsanetos, JPL's Ingenuity project manager, this end means that the JPL team will begin flying Ingenuity into particularly barren and featureless regions of Mars, with no visible space for air guidance. It happened after testing the limits of automatic navigation systems that rely on landmarks.
The US space agency said Ingenuity made an “emergency landing” during its penultimate flight on January 6, apparently due to navigational disorientation that caused it to descend more abruptly than planned.
Twelve days later, when JPL controllers attempted to perform a brief vertical flight to locate Ingenuity, data showed Ingenuity rising from the ground, briefly hovering, and then descending. It shows that after it started, it lost contact with the rover, which acts as a communications relay with Earth.
Images sent by the helicopter several days later showed the shadow of a damaged rotor blade, which apparently broke during final touchdown, Tzanetos told reporters.
Engineers believe that guidance difficulties posed by the “bland” terrain Ingenuity was flying over caused a loss of balance, causing the aircraft to suddenly list or move sideways, causing the rotors to touch the ground. Tsanetos said he believes there may have been a collision.
Ingenuity, which resembles a box with four legs and a parasol consisting of rotor blades and solar panels, will spend its final days idle, but as Perseverance moves away, it will not be able to communicate with the rover. It will periodically emit blips of data until it is lost.
Still, NASA officials have praised Ingenuity's accomplishments as paving the way for new airborne exploration of other parts of the solar system, including Mars and Saturn's moon Titan, which will lead to Dragonfly and other A rotorcraft called
There were major technical hurdles to building a helicopter to fly on Mars.
Mars has much less gravity to overcome than Earth, but its atmosphere is only 1% as dense as Earth's, making aerodynamic lift particularly difficult.
Therefore, Ingenuity was fitted with rotor blades that are larger and spin much faster than those required for similar spacecraft of the same size on Earth.
The small, lightweight vehicle had to withstand bitterly cold temperatures, with nighttime temperatures dropping to -130 degrees Fahrenheit.
NASA said engineers will conduct final tests on Ingenuity and download remaining images from its onboard computer.
