One last engineering test planned for Ingenuity
Engineers plan to do one last engineering test with Ingenuity, slowly rotate its propellers while collecting imagery, likely from both the helicopter and Perseverance.
Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity Project Manager, said that NASA and JPL still aren’t sure what caused the damage to Ingenuity’s blades; it remains unclear whether the helicopter’s power dipped during landing, causing unwanted ground contact, or if it accidentally struck the ground to cause a “brownout.”
Tzanetos added that NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will slowly rotate the helicopter’s blades and “wiggle” them, or adjust their angle, while collecting video in order to allow the team to determine the extent of Ingenuity’s damage. However, Tzanetos said that no matter what such imaging will show, the dual-rotor drone has flown its last flight and will soon end its mission.
This test will likely not occur until Perseverance gets into a position where it can film the test also. The helicopter’s cameras look downward, so all it will be able to photograph is the shadow of those blades as they move. Perseverance can look directly at it, and if it gets into a position slightly higher than Ingenuity it can get a good viewing angle down at the blades.
At the moment the rover is about a thousand feet to the east, though steadily working its way towards it.
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Engineers plan to do one last engineering test with Ingenuity, slowly rotate its propellers while collecting imagery, likely from both the helicopter and Perseverance.
Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity Project Manager, said that NASA and JPL still aren’t sure what caused the damage to Ingenuity’s blades; it remains unclear whether the helicopter’s power dipped during landing, causing unwanted ground contact, or if it accidentally struck the ground to cause a “brownout.”
Tzanetos added that NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will slowly rotate the helicopter’s blades and “wiggle” them, or adjust their angle, while collecting video in order to allow the team to determine the extent of Ingenuity’s damage. However, Tzanetos said that no matter what such imaging will show, the dual-rotor drone has flown its last flight and will soon end its mission.
This test will likely not occur until Perseverance gets into a position where it can film the test also. The helicopter’s cameras look downward, so all it will be able to photograph is the shadow of those blades as they move. Perseverance can look directly at it, and if it gets into a position slightly higher than Ingenuity it can get a good viewing angle down at the blades.
At the moment the rover is about a thousand feet to the east, though steadily working its way towards it.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
The “wiggling” is known as changing pitch. All but the simplest prop driven aircraft have props that change pitch in flight and all rotary wing aircraft have to have the ability. Essentially, it changes how much air the prop bites during each revolution. – coarse for efficient flight, fine pitch for high speed.
For an more in depth explanation of Col Beausabre’s note take a look at this video from Smarter Every Day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaB4k1SgfUg&list=PL6CECC2E56B68A2C3
To go directly to the beginning of the explanation start at about 1:22. At 2:15 they show the movement of the blades (and rotor).
This is part 2 of a multi-part series on helicopters.
I bet it could still fly.
These tests are to just prove if it can or can not.
pz,
It probably depends on if the resulting resonances are within the control capability.
Those blades spin very fast and any difference in mass and lift are going to have to be compensated for even if it can maintain the rotational rate.
If the blades are damaged, then the rest of the power train may be damaged.
Shortening a wing has many other effects, and the shape of the remaining blades may induce other unknown effects. I expect that the team truly will never fly her again. It seems that they finally pushed Ingenuity’s abilities past their limits.
I am eager for Perseverance to get close enough to begin the accident investigation.
Scott Manley has heard hypotheses that flying over the dunes may have been too much for the visual navigation system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIrX6gpUxyw (13 minutes)
As Manley says, it seems that people have become emotionally invested in Ingenuity. This seems to also be the case of the Falcon 9 booster that was recently destroyed.
I am not invested into the little guy but I do hate to see a functional probe not being used to the best it can be for as long as possible.
I blame voyager for this.
As for this copter.
I am surprised it didn’t have an overload shutdown or a vibration sensor.
I am also surprised it has only one camera and no other environmental sensors. A temperature sensor on the motor would double as an environmental temp sensor with a little work around. Sort of.
pzatchok wrote: “I am surprised it didn’t have an overload shutdown or a vibration sensor.”
It may have both, but you may have noticed that the team does not release all the data to us. They may hold back much of the data as long as they legally can, so they may know much more than we do about why they plan to never fly Ingenuity again.
An overload shutdown may be dangerous in flight, but they may have criteria for an emergency landing if the load gets close to an overload. Could this be why the penultimate flight terminated early?
A vibration sensor may in reality be part of the inertial motion unit, and they may be intending to use measurements from this unit to help determine the result of the damage during their slow rotation of the propellers/rotary wings.
I am looking forward to Perseverance getting close enough for a forensic analysis and accident investigation.
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On the not-so-related topic of commercial off the shelf (COTS) parts:
The Mars environment has a few differences from the near-Earth environment. For instance, we talk about high levels of radiation on Mars, but there are areas of much higher radiation at Earth in the Van Allan radiation belts. At Mars’s distance from the Earth, the solar radiation is about half the amount at the orbital distance to of the Earth. Mars’ atmosphere may be thin, but it provides some amount more convection cooling than orbits can. The point being that this is an easier laboratory for COTS parts than Earth orbit provides, but with smallsats being so inexpensive to make and launch, low Earth orbit is a good laboratory for orbital experiments with COTS parts.
The overall low cost of smallsats also means that it is less important for them to last for long missions, so parts need not be as robust as the typical NASA satellite or especially the NASA probes to deep space, where long mission times are necessary. The point of this paragraph being that the satellite or the probe must be designed with the mission in mind. Until retanking (refueling) operations become common, a mission’s lifetime may not be much longer than the expected life of stationkeeping propellants.
We only keep track of the Voyager probes because they have instruments that can evaluate the space environment that far out from the Sun. If all they had were cameras, no one would have bothered with them after their last planetary encounters. We have landed probes on asteroids or crashed them into the planets or moons they were exploring so that they would not become jetsam after their lifespans expired. In some ways it is too late for Earth orbit, but it is better to litter Mars or the Moon than to litter martian orbits or lunar orbits, as we did to our own orbits. Sometimes we just have to abandon hardware before the end of its useful life, just to make sure it does not become a hazard to navigation. I’m too lazy, on this Sunday afternoon, to look it up, right now, but there was a recent fine imposed on a commercial communication company that failed to get its geostationary satellite into the proper graveyard orbit. They tried to get too much usefulness from it, and now the government thinks it may become a hazard.
The reduced expectation of COTS parts must be taken into account when planning the lifetime and eventual disposal of space hardware.
one last engineering test:
Back the rover off to a safe distance, then create a warp-core breach in the helicopter engine, generating an inverse tachyon burst with a phase-variance of .004 sending it back in time, where they can prevent the initial damage from occurring. (it’s never been done before, but we need to wrap this up in 12 minutes…)