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NASA thinks it’s figured out why the Mars helicopter crashed
A navigation error led to a hard landing.
The craft’s vision navigation system, which was designed to track textured features on the surface of Mars, was confused by a featureless stretch of rippled sandy terrain, resulting in incorrect velocity estimates that led to a hard landing. Relying on remote data, including photographs taken after the flight, the investigators believe that “navigation errors created high horizontal velocities at touchdown,” which most likely resulted in Ingenuity experiencing a “hard impact on the sand ripple’s slope,” causing it to pitch and roll. However, despite being permanently grounded, communications were reestablished the next day, and Ingenuity “still beams weather and avionics test data to the Perseverance rover about once a week,” which NASA says “is already proving useful to engineers working on future designs of aircraft and other vehicles for the Red Planet.”
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