Mars Guy (YouTube) Episode 150
On the 72nd flight of its 5-flight mission, Ingenuity suffered catastrophic damage when its rotor blades contacted a sand ripple during landing. Now it’s beaming back new images from tests that expose the extent of the destruction.
They lost contact with the rover when it was only 1 meter from the ground at its intended landing spot. It hit the ripple 10 meters away from its designated landing spot. It seems the helicopter suffered from a brown out (lost power) so no data was saved to its onboard computer, or sent to the rover after that time, so they can only theorise on why it travelled 10 meters to the west or which blades hit the dune first. If they can image the separated blade and the helicopter with SuperCam they might be able to gather more clues that could point to the sequence of the events, but the most important data was lost after the brown out. Engineers learn a lot when things go right, but they usually learn a whole lot more when stuff fails. Let’s hope SuperCam is used to obtain some more clues.
Damn, that sucks. Does Ingenuity have an earth-bound twin sister we could use to try and reproduce the issue? Wouldn’t be able to recover the lost data, but might be able to recreate something similar.
They can simulate a flight on the earth bound kit, but they lost the data that could point to the events that led up to it. I would guess that it would be near imposible to isolate the specific event that led to the demise of the helicopter, was it the brown-out that led to the 10 meter flight to the west and contact with the dune ripple, or did the blades whacking the dune ripple at high speed crash the computer with a power surge, or something completely different. I’m sure the team at JPL will test a bunch of scenarios before they can sleep well at night…