After nearly three years, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, the first spacecraft to undertake a powered flight on another world, has ended its mission. Officials at the agency confirmed on January 25 that the history-making quad-copter has sustained damage to one of its rotor blades and is no longer capable of flying.
Many on the Ingenuity team are already thinking back fondly on the mission’s many accomplishments. “[For] a helicopter that’s overperformed the way that this has, I don’t think you can really mourn it and be sad,” says Håvard Fjær Grip, the mission’s chief pilot and an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Ingenuity — Ginny to its friends — hitched along with NASA’s car-sized rover Perseverance as the rover landed on Mars in February 2021 (SN: 2/17/21). A few months later, the small helicopter spun its rotor blades, climbed into the thin Martian atmosphere, rose to a height of three meters, and took a picture of Perseverance during its first test flight (SN: 4/19/21).
The aerial robot vastly outperformed its initial expectations, which was to fly a handful of times over 30 days. The idea was to demonstrate flight was possible on Mars, and then ground itself. Ingenuity instead undertook a total of 72 flights, traveling 14 times farther than planned and logging more than two hours of total flight time. During its travels, the helicopter did far more than fly: It became part of the science mission (SN: 4/30/21). Ingenuity made 3-D elevation maps of its surroundings, went places that Perseverance couldn’t get to, and scouted potential sites for the rover’s scientific observations.
2024-01-25 16:56:28
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