72 flights later and a rotor blade short, Mars chopper loses its fight with physics A little more light is being shed on the fate of NASA's Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, thanks to fresh images snapped by the Perseverance rover. After an expectation-busting 72 flights over almost three years, the helicopter was finally retired in January 2024 when NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) found rotor damage …
Many in NASA didn’t want the helicopter. It took the unignorable pressure from a Senator with the purse strings in his hands to get it included in the trip. It’s a tremendous success for him and for the engineers who did it, but it was not a glorious episode for some echelons in NASA who repeatedly tried to stop it happening, at least in the earlier days of planning this mission.
Er the raw images are from NASA, the link is https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/LRE_1072_0762099726_099ECM_N0501618SCAM02072_0010I9J
The reprocessed ones where done by a student who doesn’t work for said organisation, as they aren’t official NASA images they won’t be posted on an official website.
For copyright it is better to link images.
Why are you linking to Xshitter for photos instead of NASA or JPL???
Upvoted after Xshitter said "your browser is no longer supported, click here to install a better one"...
How the fuck did the entire planet forget what HTML was for?
"How the fuck did the entire planet forget what HTML was for?"
Marketing has bamboozled the GreatUnwashed into thinking glitter is a replacement for information ... and are now in the process of convincing the same ineducable masses into thinking one brand of glitter is better than any other brand of glitter, leading to a tragedy of the commons.
It's quite sad, really (in the old meaning of sad).
I know the JPL team is made of geniuses that managed to do something incredible with flying on another planet...
...but are you now telling me that their final flight managed to land correctly (like, the right way up!) with a freaking rotor missing? How the bloody hell did they pull that off?!?
My guess - the rotors were damaged (if not visibly) on a(/the?) previous flight, and the tips failed during the flight, with the imbalance on the upper rotor causing loss of rotor. Since it was just a straight up and down... it could probably have dropped a fair way and survived.
My thoughts are that a blade fatigued causing rotor imbalance and the fatigued blade damaged all the other blades before being hurled off at high speed. YouTube has videos of blade fatigue on wind turbines, one second it’s there, the next it isn’t and the turbine usually shakes itself to bits in another second or so.
I blame the JPL. They're clearly not competent to do this job. They're the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, not the Electric Rotor Propulsion Laboratory for a reason you know.
I managed to completely miss all the stories about the planning for the helicopter - so it was a brilliant surprise when I read about the successful landing and then bonus helicopter on another bloody planet. And then woohoo! Over 70 flights!
Now we've had helicopters on Mars we need Ski-Doos on Enceladus and Europa (assuming we're allowed to land there). Also water slides on Venus? OK, the water would boil, but you can slide on molten lead can't you?
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