Ingenuity may be down, but it’s not out.
Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) gave an update on the downed Ingenuity Mars helicopter on Wednesday (Dec. 11) during the 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington, D.C. After traveling to Mars attached to the Perseverance rover, Ingenuity began a test flight campaign to prove that powered flight in the thin Martian atmosphere was possible. After almost three years of operating on the Red Planet, Ingenuity crashed during its 72nd flight on Jan. 18, 2024, suffering rotor damage that rendered it incapable of ever flying again.
But after conducting the “first aircraft investigation on another world,” Ingenuity’s mission managers at JPL say the helicopter could have a second life on the Red Planet. “We are very proud to report that, even after the hard landing in flight, 72 avionics battery sensors have all been functional, and she still has one final gift for us, which is that she’s now going to continue on as a weather station of sorts, recording telemetry, taking images every single sol and storing them on board,” said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity’s project manager at JPL, during the team’s presentation at AGU.
JPL has spent months investigating Ingenuity’s crash, and determined that the helicopter’s navigation systems had too little information to go with due to the monotone, bland texture of the Martian surface.
“This does not mean that we’ve been able to figure out everything about the flight,” said Ingenuity’s first pilot, JPL’s Håvard Grip, at today’s presentation at AGU 2024. “Our conclusion is that we don’t have enough information to disentangle some of the details about the sequence of events right around landing.”
Grip added that, while the team’s investigation is over, it is far from complete due to the vast distance between JPL and Ingenuity’s final resting place.
“One of the things that makes it difficult to investigate this is the relative lack of information,” he said. “The accident site itself is about, you know — it’s more than 100 million miles [160 million kilometers] away. There’s no black box, there are no eyewitnesses. We can’t walk up and touch anything, so we have to work with the small pieces of information that we have.”
However, JPL scientists added that, aside from its mission-ending rotor damage, Ingenuity remains in otherwise good health. In fact, if you were to ask the helicopter itself, Ingenuity would report that everything is fine, Tzanetos said.
“If you were to query Ingenuity’s health system, she’s green across the board as far as she’s concerned. She doesn’t have a sensor on the rotor system to detect the damage. But we are very proud to report that, even after the hard landing on flight 72, avionics, battery, [and] sensors have all been functional.”
Tzanetos added that Ingenuity has around 20 years’ worth of onboard storage remaining, meaning it can keep taking measurements and images every Martian sol (a solar day on Mars).
But there may be no way to get that data back to Earth. The Perseverance rover, through which Ingenuity communicates via radio link in order to send its data back to its mission team, is now 1.8 miles (3 km) away from the helicopter. Soon, Ingenuity might lose its ability to communicate with its human controllers on Earth.
“I think it’s a good bet that, within the next month, we’ll lose contact forever, or until we come back in 20 years with astronauts, or until we turn back for sample return,” Tzanetos said during the presentation at AGU.
Despite its crash, Ingenuity proved to be wildly successful. The helicopter was designed to make only five flights on Mars, and ended up making 72. Because it was only a flight demonstrator, the helicopter was not designed to carry science instruments.
But JPL is already looking to the future of powered flight on Mars. During today’s presentation at AGU, JPL scientists presented a video of a new Red Planet helicopter concept known as Mars Chopper.
The design is still conceptual and does not have a timeline for reaching Mars, but JPL is envisioning a six-rotor concept that is 20 times heavier than Ingenuity and could carry “several pounds of science equipment and autonomously explore remote Martian locations while traveling up to 2 miles (3 kilometers) in a day, according to a JPL statement.
