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By European Space Agency
Image: The southern lights at Concordia station in Antarctica View the full article
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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, right, stands near the apex of a sand ripple in an image taken by Perseverance on Feb. 24, 2024, about five weeks after the rotorcraft’s final flight. Part of one of Ingenuity’s rotor blades lies on the surface about 49 feet (15 meters) west of helicopter (at left in image).NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS The review takes a close look the final flight of the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which was the first aircraft to fly on another world.
Engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and AeroVironment are completing a detailed assessment of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s final flight on Jan. 18, 2024, which will be published in the next few weeks as a NASA technical report. Designed as a technology demonstration to perform up to five experimental test flights over 30 days, Ingenuity was the first aircraft on another world. It operated for almost three years, performed 72 flights, and flew more than 30 times farther than planned while accumulating over two hours of flight time.
The investigation concludes that the inability of Ingenuity’s navigation system to provide accurate data during the flight likely caused a chain of events that ended the mission. The report’s findings are expected to benefit future Mars helicopters, as well as other aircraft destined to operate on other worlds.
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NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter used its black-and-white navigation camera to capture this video on Feb. 11, 2024, showing the shadow of its rotor blades. The imagery confirmed damage had occurred during Flight 72. NASA/JPL-Caltech Final Ascent
Flight 72 was planned as a brief vertical hop to assess Ingenuity’s flight systems and photograph the 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 following day, the mission reestablished communications, and images that came down six days after the flight revealed Ingenuity had sustained severe damage to its rotor blades.
What Happened
“When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses,” said Ingenuity’s first pilot, Håvard Grip of JPL. “While multiple scenarios are viable with the available data, we have one we believe is most likely: Lack of surface texture gave the navigation system too little information to work with.”
The helicopter’s vision navigation system was designed to track visual features on the surface using a downward-looking camera over well-textured (pebbly) but flat terrain. This limited tracking capability was more than sufficient for carrying out Ingenuity’s first five flights, but by Flight 72 the helicopter was in a region of Jezero Crater filled with steep, relatively featureless sand ripples.
This short animation depicts a NASA concept for a proposed follow-on to the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter called Mars Chopper, which remains in early conceptual and design stages. In addition to scouting, such a helicopter could carry science instruments to study terrain rovers can’t reach. One of the navigation system’s main requirements was to provide velocity estimates that would enable the helicopter to land within a small envelope of vertical and horizontal velocities. Data sent down during Flight 72 shows that, around 20 seconds after takeoff, the navigation system couldn’t find enough surface features to track.
Photographs taken after the flight indicate the navigation errors created high horizontal velocities at touchdown. In the most likely scenario, the hard impact on the sand ripple’s slope caused Ingenuity to 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.
This graphic depicts the most likely scenario for the hard landing of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 72nd and final flight on Jan. 18, 2024. High horizontal velocities at touchdown resulted in a hard impact on a sand ripple, which caused Ingenuity to pitch and roll, damaging its rotor blades. NASA/JPL-Caltech Down but Not Out
Although Flight 72 permanently grounded Ingenuity, the helicopter still beams weather and avionics test data to the Perseverance rover about once a week. The weather information could benefit future explorers of the Red Planet. The avionics data is already proving useful to engineers working on future designs of aircraft and other vehicles for the Red Planet.
“Because Ingenuity was designed to be affordable while demanding huge amounts of computer power, we became the first mission to fly commercial off-the-shelf cellphone processors in deep space,” said Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity’s project manager. “We’re now approaching four years of continuous operations, suggesting that not everything needs to be bigger, heavier, and radiation-hardened to work in the harsh Martian environment.”
Inspired by Ingenuity’s longevity, NASA engineers have been testing smaller, lighter avionics that could be used in vehicle designs for the Mars Sample Return campaign. The data is also helping engineers as they research what a future Mars helicopter could look like — and do.
During a Wednesday, Dec. 11, briefing at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in Washington, Tzanetos shared details on the Mars Chopper rotorcraft, a concept that he and other Ingenuity alumni are researching. As designed, Chopper is approximately 20 times heavier than Ingenuity, could fly several pounds of science equipment, and autonomously explore remote Martian locations while traveling up to 2 miles (3 kilometers) in a day. (Ingenuity’s longest flight was 2,310 feet, or 704 meters.)
“Ingenuity has given us the confidence and data to envision the future of flight at Mars,” said Tzanetos.
More About Ingenuity
The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was built by JPL, which also manages the project for NASA Headquarters. It is supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, provided significant flight performance analysis and technical assistance during Ingenuity’s development. AeroVironment, Qualcomm, and SolAero also provided design assistance and major vehicle components. Lockheed Space designed and manufactured the Mars Helicopter Delivery System. At NASA Headquarters, Dave Lavery is the program executive for the Ingenuity Mars helicopter.
For more information about Ingenuity:
https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter
News Media Contacts
DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Dec 11, 2024 Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
On 1 December 2024, BepiColombo flew past Mercury for the fifth time. During this flyby, BepiColombo became the first spacecraft ever to observe Mercury in mid-infrared light. The new images reveal variations in temperature and composition across the planet's cratered surface.
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By USH
A rare and intriguing phenomenon has been observed in China. On the night of October 27th, Chinese astrophotographer Shengyu Li set up his camera to capture star trails over Mount Xiannairi in Sichuan Province. To his surprise, he recorded mysterious blue flashes accompanying an avalanche.
The exact cause of these "blue lights" remains unclear, sparking various theories. Some speculate they could stem from geomagnetic activity, interactions of cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere, or rare atmospheric phenomena like blue jets or elves. However, Li offers another explanation: the flashes might result from triboluminescence—light produced by friction during ice fragmentation.
Triboluminescence occurs when certain materials emit light as they are fractured, scratched, or rubbed. This phenomenon happens due to the breaking of chemical bonds or the sudden separation of surfaces, which generates electrical charges. These charges can ionize the surrounding air or excite the material itself, creating visible light.
The hypothesis suggests that this event could be an example of triboluminescence. However, it also raises the intriguing possibility of a connection to UFO phenomena, such as orbs or other unexplained lights that have been observed around the world over the years.
Hypothesis: The sighting depicts what appears to be a blue light descending onto a snowbank, following the avalanche as it moves downward, and then vanishing before seemingly ascending again.
Did the avalanche trigger the blue light, or did the blue light crash into the snow, causing the avalanche?
Whether this phenomenon is a rare case of triboluminescence, potentially the first instance of it being captured on camera or something linked to unexplained UFO activity, the recording of this light remains a unique and fascinating occurrence. View the full article
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By NASA
Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions The Solar System The Sun Mercury Venus Earth The Moon Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto & Dwarf Planets Asteroids, Comets & Meteors The Kuiper Belt The Oort Cloud 4 min read
Sols 4331-4333: Today’s Rover ABC – Aurora, Backwards Driving, and Chemistry, with a Side of Images
This image shows just how variable and interesting the terrain is in the area that NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity is currently investigating. Curiosity captured this long-distance Remote Micro Imager (RMI) image using the Chemistry & Camera (ChemCam) aboard the rover on sol 4329 — Martian day 4,329 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — on Oct. 10, 2024 at 02:30:12 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL Earth planning date: Friday, Oct. 11, 2024
This blogger is in the United Kingdom, just north of London, where we yesterday had beautiful night skies with a red aurora that was even visible with the unaided eye, and looked stunning on photographs. That reminded me of the solar storm that made it all the way to Mars earlier this year. Here is my colleague Deborah’s blog about it: “Aurora Watch on Mars.” And, of course, that was a great opportunity to do atmospheric science and prepare for future crewed missions, to assess radiation that future astronauts might encounter. You can read about it in the article, “NASA Watches Mars Light Up During Epic Solar Storm.” But now, back from shiny red night skies north of London, and auroras on Mars six months ago, to today’s planning!
Power — always a negotiation! Today, I was the Science Operations Working Group chair, the one who has to watch for the more technical side of things, such as the question if all the activities will fit into the plan. Today there were many imaging ideas to capture the stunning landscape in detail with Mastcam and very close close-ups with the long-distance imaging capability of ChemCam (RMI). Overall, we have two long-distance RMIs in the plan to capture the details of the ridge we are investigating. You can see in the accompanying image an example from last sol of just how many stunning details we can see. I so want to go and pick up that smooth white-ish looking rock to find out if it is just the light that makes it so bright, or if the surface is different from the underside… but that’s just me, a mineralogist by training, used to wandering around a field site! Do you notice the different patterns — textures as we call them in geology — on the rocks to the left of that white-ish rock and the right of it? So much stunning detail, and we are getting two more RMI observations of 10 frames each in today’s plan! In addition there are more than 80 Mastcam frames planned. Lots of images to learn from!
Chemistry is also featuring in the plan. The rover is stable on its wheels, which means we can get the arm out and do an APXS measurement on the target “Midnight Lake,” which MAHLI also images. The LIBS investigations are seconding the APXS investigation on Midnight Lake, and add another target to the plan, “Pyramidal Pinnacle.” On the third sol there is an AEGIS, the LIBS measurement where the rover picks its own target before we here on Earth even see where it is! Power was especially tight today, because the CheMin team does some housekeeping, in particular looking at empty cells in preparation for the next drill. The atmosphere team adds many investigations to look out for dust devils and the dustiness of the atmosphere, and APXS measures the argon content of the atmosphere. This is a measure for the seasonal changes of the atmosphere, as argon is an inert gas that does not react with other components of the atmosphere. It is only controlled by the temperature in various places of the planet — mainly the poles. DAN continues to monitor water in the subsurface, and RAD — prominently featured during the solar storm I was talking about earlier — continues to collect data on the radiation environment.
Let’s close with a fun fact from planning today: During one of the meetings, the rover drivers were asked, “Are you driving backwards again?” … and the answer was yes! The reason: We need to make sure that in this rugged terrain, with its many interesting walls (interesting for the geologists!), the antenna can still see Earth when we want to send the plan. So the drive on sol 4332 is all backwards. I am glad we have hazard cameras on the front and the back of the vehicle!
Written by Susanne Schwenzer, Planetary Geologist at The Open University
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Last Updated Oct 13, 2024 Related Terms
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