NASA rover finds damaged helicopter in the middle of Mars desert
After a recent rough landing, the damaged Ingenuity helicopter can’t fly again. Now, NASA’s Perseverance rover has spotted the grounded extraterrestrial chopper sitting alone in a valley on Mars.
The NASA imagery below, processed and enhanced by the geovisual designer Simeon Schmauß, underscores the desolation of profoundly arid Mars, a desert planet that’s largely lost its insulating atmosphere and is 1,000 times drier than the driest desert on Earth.
Both the Perseverance rover and its former aerial scout, Ingenuity, had been searching for the best places to look for past evidence of Martian life — should any ever have existed. Now the car-sized rover will hunt alone.
Before its recent accident, the Ingenuity craft made history. The experimental robot was the first craft to ever make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. And then, it kept flying. Ingenuity flew on Mars a whopping 72 times — engineers initially hoped it might fly five times, if at all. It flew distances as far as 2,315 feet.
And it overcame a daunting flight challenge. The Martian atmosphere is quite thin, with a volume about one percent of Earth’s. This makes it difficult to generate the lift needed for flight. To take to the air, Ingenuity spun its four-foot rotor blades at a blazing 2,400 revolutions every minute.
Yet a hard landing on Jan. 18 resulted in broken rotors. The helicopter can no longer generate the lift needed for flight.
The images show Ingenuity’s “final resting place among the sand ripples in Neretva Vallis,” Schmauß wrote on his Flickr page.
This smooth, sandy terrain was ultimately Ingenuity’s demise. The helicopter navigated by using software to track the movement of objects, like rocks, below. But the sandy terrain was largely “featureless,” NASA explained.
“The more featureless the terrain is, the harder it is for Ingenuity to successfully navigate across it,” the space agency said in a statement. “The team believes that the relatively featureless terrain in this region was likely the root cause of the anomalous landing.”
The ripples of Martian time will now shape around, and upon, Ingenuity. Perhaps a dust storm, or a common, though potent, Mars dust devil will knock the robot over. But its legacy is certain. Ingenuity proved that flight on Mars isn’t just possible — but aerial exploration may loom large in Mars’ future. In the coming decades, a Martian plane may even swoop over the desert world..
NASA’s Mars helicopter just died. Here’s what happened.
It’s extraordinarily hard to fly on Mars. But NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter did it — 72 times.
On Jan. 25, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson gloomily announced that the helicopter’s 72nd flight was its final extraterrestrial trip. The first craft to ever make a powered, controlled flight on another planet damaged at least one of its essential four rotor blades, and cannot take flight again.
“It is bittersweet that I must announce that Ingenuity, the little helicopter that could — and it kept saying I think I can I think I can — well, it’s now taken its last flight,” Nelson said in a video posted to X, formerly Twitter.
The small, solar-powered, experimental craft flew for almost three years, logging over two hours of flight time over the Martian desert. Its life of flying, however, is clearly over.
“While the helicopter remains upright and in communication with ground controllers, imagery of its Jan. 18 flight sent to Earth this week indicates one or more of its rotor blades sustained damage during landing, and it is no longer capable of flight,” the space agency explained in a statement.
The helicopter’s final landing on Jan. 18 was “rough,” NASA explained. It was flying over smooth dunes, “relatively featureless terrain” that proved hard for the craft’s autonomous navigation system to track.
Over the years, Ingenuity overcame profoundly challenging flight conditions on Mars. Compared to Earth, the Martian atmosphere is quite thin. Its volume is about 1 percent of Earth’s, making it difficult to generate the lift needed for flight. To take to the air, Ingenuity spun four-foot-long rotor blades at a blazing 2,400 revolutions every minute. It flew distances as far as 2,315 feet.
Ingenuity served as a “scout” for NASA’s Perseverance rover, as the two Martian robots sleuthed for places that might have preserved signs of past primitive life on the Martian surface. This could mean telltale pieces of genetic material, or parts of a degraded cell.
So far, there’s no proof life ever existed on Mars — or anywhere beyond Earth, for that matter. But Ingenuity, which proved that flight in the harsh environs on Mars was possible, has set the stage for future aviation endeavors on the Red Planet.
“That remarkable helicopter flew higher and farther than we ever imagined and helped NASA do what we do best – make the impossible, possible,” Nelson said.
NASA lost its Mars helicopter. Now it’s looking into a Martian plane.
NASA wants to hear far-out, unconventional, and out-of-this-world aerospace ideas.
The space agency’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program — which encourages “visionary ideas that could transform future NASA missions with the creation of breakthroughs” — funds research into a diversity of ambitious proposals it finds compelling. For example, NASA is currently funding an idea (still only an idea) to construct a telescope the size of Washington, D.C., on the moon.
Now, the program has released a new batch of innovative concepts that it’s chosen for further theoretical development, and included is a plane designed to fly around Mars — and stay aloft in the extremely thin Martian atmosphere. The proposal is called MAGGIE (short for Mars Aerial and Ground Intelligent Explorer), and it’s an aircraft envisioned to provide unprecedented exploration of Mars’ surface.
And unlike planes on Earth, the craft is designed to take off and land vertically, like a helicopter.
“You can land any place you feel is interesting,” Gecheng Zha, the director of the CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and Aerodynamics Lab at the University of Miami, told Mashable.
The Martian plane is a novel idea, but perhaps not as wild as it sounds. NASA is only spending some $175,000 on 13 different awardees for this early “Phase I” conceptual research. But it comes with the opportunity for NASA to further develop such aerospace technology and move innovation to the next phase — which means even more funding and support.
“Anything proposed to NASA has to be very, very well thought out,” Zha, who is also the president and founder of Coflow Jet, the aviation technology company that proposed the MAGGIE craft, emphasized. “It has to have scientific merit. It can’t just be science fiction.”
A plane on Mars
The Martian aircraft, which would be powered by the solar panels spread across its wings, has a strong Mars influence: NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter — a NIAC-graduate and the first craft to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. The small, solar-powered experimental chopper, with four-foot-long rotor blades that spun a blazing 2,400 revolutions every minute, made over 70 successful flights before meeting its demise on Jan. 25 after a rough landing. Originally, engineers hoped it might fly five times, if at all.
Yet a plane would be able to carry significantly more weight than a future Martian helicopter, and would fly more efficiently on a distant world where craft would almost certainly need to rely on the sun for energy, Zha explained. (A nuclear-powered endeavor, like the Perseverance rover, requires a heavy engine. That would make lifting into the air difficult.)
Flying anything on Mars is a great challenge. That’s because, compared to Earth, the Martian atmosphere is quite thin. Its volume is about 1 percent of Earth’s, making it difficult to generate the lift needed for flight. Yet the MAGGIE plane’s narrow double-wings are designed (conceptually) to produce many times more lift than conventional aircraft on our planet.
Once in the air, the plane would cruise at some 60 meters per second, or nearly 135 mph. That’s significantly slower than, say, the commercial jets you’re used to flying on. But on Mars, flying slower is imperative. Flying quickly burns too much energy.
“You don’t want to fly too fast,” Zha emphasized..
The trick is in the wings’ flaps. The propellers are always facing forward, but by turning the wing flap down to 90 degrees, the airflow from the propellers creates lift. “That will get the plane up vertically,” Zha explained.
One day, perhaps, a plane like MAGGIE will robotically explore the Martian surface from some 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) for interesting places to land and capture samples. It will be a compact plane — MAGGIE is currently designed with about a 26-foot (7.85 meters) wingspan — so it could fit and fold inside a large rocket. But it would allow unprecedented exploration of the Red Planet, a world that once gushed with water and could have potentially hosted primitive life — if life ever existed on Mars, that is.
Planes on Mars may also prove essential for Martian travel later this century and beyond. After all, it’s hard to get around on a world without an Interstate Highway System.
