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Engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California and unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) manufacturer Aerovironment, a leading aerospace and defense contractor, are implementing what the space agency said Wednesday said is the first investigation into aircraft accidents on another world. Personnel investigate NASA’s last flight Ingenuity Mars helicopter, which crashed into the surface of the Red Planet and landed there retired in January.

Designed to conduct five experimental test flights over the course of one month, Ingenuity ultimately flying 72 missions over three years of operation, covering 30 times more ground than planned. Now NASA knows what finally brought it to an end.

Tied under NASA’s Mars Perseverance wanderer, Ingenuity launched to the Red Planet in July 2020 and made its first trip the following April it became the first aircraft to fly on another planet under its own power. The ‘Wright Brothers Moment’ kicked off a campaign that exceeded the space agency’s wildest expectations.

The battery-powered helicopter plane weighs about 4 pounds on Earth, but only 1.5 pounds on Mars due to the planet’s thin atmosphere. Flying under these conditions was expected to be challenging:Ingenuity had an intended range of 980 feet and a flight altitude of only 50 feet. However, in April 2022 the plane set an extraplanetary distance record by traveling 2,000 feet at a speed of 12 miles per hour. On another flight it reached a top height of about 75 feet.

Undoubtedly, Ingenuity overachieved. But eventually it crashed on Mars.

Flight 72 was intended to be a vertical pop-up flight to test the helicopter’s systems and take pictures of the Jezero crater on Mars. However, while descending from a height of about 40 feet, NASA lost contact with the Perseverance rover, which had sent communications to mission control. When communication was restored, images showed “serious damage”. Ingenuity‘s rotor blades.

Without the help of investigators on the ground or live footage of the crash, NASA could not determine what went wrong. However, using the little information the space agency has, engineers believe they have pieced together a timeline.

“If you conduct an accident investigation 100 million miles away, you have no black boxes or eyewitnesses,” said Håvard grip from NASA JPL, Ingenuity‘s first pilot. “Although several scenarios are feasible with the available data, we have one that we believe is the most likely: the lack of surface texture did not give the navigation system enough information to work with.”

Researchers believe IngenuityThe helicopter’s visual navigation system, which was used to help the helicopter track the landscape below and identify safe landing areas, malfunctioned, creating a “sequence of events” that led to the crash.

The navigation system used a downward-facing camera to help Ingenuity flying over flat terrain, and according to NASA this was sufficient for the helicopter’s five planned missions. But by Flight 72 it had reached a part of the Jezero crater characterized by “steep, relatively featureless sand ripples.” The navigation system tracked surface features to assist Ingenuity Adjust speed before landing. But according to data analyzed by NASA engineers, there were no more features to track.

Based on photos of the helicopter after the flight, researchers theorize that it crashed into the sand slope of the crater at high speed, causing the blades to break off. The damage caused vibrations that caused one of the blades to break off at the root, and the resulting power demand on the other blades caused a communications outage.

Although Ingenuity is on the ground, the helicopter continues to transmit data from the surface of Mars back to NASA about once a week. For example, data from avionics helps engineers develop smaller and lighter avionics that can be integrated into vehicles return samples from Mars.

Ingenuity alumni are also researching a much larger version of the Mars helicopter, the Mars Chopper. The concept design is approximately 20 times larger than its predecessor and could carry several kilos of equipment. The intended range – about three kilometers – would be more than four times greater than Ingenuity‘s longest flight.

“Because Ingenuity was designed to be affordable while requiring enormous amounts of computing power, we became the first mission to fly commercial off-the-shelf mobile phone processors into space,” said JPL’s Teddy Tzanetos, project manager for Ingenuity and one of the main characters on the Mars Chopper. “We are now approaching four years of continuous operations, which suggests that not everything needs to be bigger, heavier and radiation-hardened to function in the harsh environment of Mars.”

FAA and NTSB accident investigations are critical to improving the safety of U.S. airspace. In a similar vein, NASA’s alien crash research could help future engineers develop the technology the space agency needs to explore for the benefit of humanity.