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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Eleven months after the Ingenuity helicopter made its final flight on Mars, engineers and scientists at NASA and a private company that helped build the flying vehicle said they have identified what probably caused it to crash on the surface of Mars.
In short, the helicopter’s on-board navigation sensors were unable to discern enough features in the relatively smooth surface of Mars to determine its position, so when it touched down, it did so moving horizontally. This caused the vehicle to tumble, snapping off all four of the helicopter’s blades.
According to Scott Manley, there might have also been a brown out right about the time of landing, which caused the navigation computer to go away at just the wrong time.
Requisite Manley analysis.
Press conference at AGU (American Geophysical Union).
The Ars article mentions “draining the vehicle’s power and leading to a loss of communications” but yeah, sounds like the motors pulled too much current in a hard touchdown and the controllers dropped out.