/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15995643
https://spacenews.com/ingenuity-mars-helicopter-mission-ends-after-72-flights/
> “Whether or not the blade strike occurred, which led to the communications loss, or there was a communications loss and a power brownout which then led to the rotor strike, we will never know,” he said, because of a loss of data during the incident, but added that the project team would try to piece together their best guess of what happened with the data they do get.
> One possibility is that the featureless terrain that Ingenuity was flying over may have confused the helicopter’s navigation system. Such systems work by tracking features on the surface and correlating them, throwing out spurious ones. “The danger is when you run out of features, you don’t have very many to navigate on. You’re not able to establish what that consensus is and you end up tracking the wrong kinds of features,” said Håvard Grip, the “pilot emeritus” for Ingenuity, on the call.
> In such a scenario, he said, the helicopter may think it’s moving horizontally away from its target landing site and overcorrects. “It’s likely it made an aggressive maneuver to try and correct that upon landing, and that would have accounted for sideways motion and tilted the helicopter,” he said. That could either have caused a blade to strike the ground or to lose power before landing.

so the problem may have been with the navigation system getting confused by a featureless landscape and faceplanting due to that