After reaching Mars with the Perseverance rover in early 2021, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter proved to be a huge success, exceeding all expectations with an astonishing 72 flights across the surface of Mars.
But three years after Ingenuity entered the history books as the first aircraft to achieve powered, controlled flight on another planet, one of its rotor blades was damaged in early 2024, rendering the aircraft unable to fly.
Still, the plane’s successful mission to map portions of the Martian surface and support Perseverance inspired engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to work on next-generation models for future missions to Mars and possibly beyond.
In order to test the software and hardware of the new helicopter, locations must be flown to that offer almost Mars-like conditions – of course without the extremely thin atmosphere of the Red Planet.
As part of this work, a JPL team recently traveled to California’s Death Valley National Park, a barren, dusty landscape that bears some resemblance to the fourth planet from the sun. Engineers tested new software by flying a drone over the Mars Hill and Mesquite Flats sand dunes in Death Valley.
“Ingenuity was designed to fly over well-structured terrain and estimate its movement based on visual features on the ground. However, it ultimately had to traverse rougher areas where this became difficult,” said Roland Brockers, a JPL researcher and drone pilot. “We want future vehicles to be more versatile and not have to worry about flying over challenging areas like these sand dunes.”
The test campaign has already accelerated the development of the drone. The team discovered how different camera filters helped the drone track the ground below more effectively, and how new algorithms can control the flying machine to land safely in confusing terrain like that of Mars Hill.
“Field testing gives you a much broader perspective than just looking at computer models and limited satellite imagery,” said JPL’s Nathan Williams, a geologist on the team who previously helped run Ingenuity. “Scientifically interesting features aren’t always in the most innocuous places, so we want to be prepared to explore even more challenging terrain than Ingenuity has.”
It’s not the first time a NASA team has traveled to Death Valley to test equipment for other worlds. Space agency engineers have been using the area since the 1970s, when it was preparing for the first Mars landings by the twin Viking spacecraft. It recently traveled there to test the Perseverance rover’s precision landing system by flying a component of it in a piloted helicopter. The rover’s arrival on Mars was captured in an extraordinary video that detailed the final moments before landing.
