Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Crash Helps Us Learn About The Red Planet
The small aircraft met the demise of its main mission on 18 January 2024, after nearly three epic years of flitting around in the thin Martian atmosphere, like the piece of engineering marvel that it is.
Its final flight was both sad and triumphant: the helicopter was only planned to fly five times across a total of 31 days, yet managed a jaw-dropping 72 flights over the surface of the red planet.
The data collected during these flights told us a lot about Mars, and how to navigate the challenges it presents for human exploration. And now, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and defense contractor AeroVironment are finishing up their investigation.
This, too, is exciting: it's the first aircraft accident report ever conducted for another planet, the distance to which presented some unique challenges.
"When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don't have any black boxes or eyewitnesses," says cybernetics engineer and roboticist Håvard Grip of JPL.
