Ingenuity's Hard Landing

This graphic depicts the most likely scenario for the hard landing NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter took during its 72nd and final flight on Jan. 18, 2024. Engineers at JPL and AeroVironment, which collaborated with NASA on the helicopter's design and development, are completing a detailed assessment of the final flight that will be published as an agency technical report. Flight 72 was planned as a brief vertical hop to assess Ingenuity's flight systems and photograph the surrounding area. Data from the flight shows Ingenuity climbing to 40 feet (12 meters), hovering, and capturing images. It initiated its descent at 19 seconds, and by 32 seconds the helicopter was back on the surface and had halted communications. The assessment describes the mostly likely scenario for Flight 72, as follows. Lack of suitable features on the planet's surface for the helicopter's navigation system to track resulted in high horizontal velocities at the time the helicopter touched down. This caused a hard impact on a sloping sand ripple, making Ingenuity pitch and roll. The rapid attitude change resulted in loads on the fast-rotating rotor blades beyond their design limits, snapping all four of them off at their weakest point – about a third of the way from the tip. The damaged blades caused excessive vibration in the rotor system, ripping the remainder of one blade from its root and generating an excessive power demand that resulted in loss of communications. https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA26482