The robot flew 72 times, serving as a scouting partner to the Perseverance rover, aiding in the search for evidence that there was once life on the red planet.
Ingenuity, the little Mars helicopter that could, can’t anymore.
At least one rotor broke during the robotic flying machine’s most recent flight last week, NASA officials announced on Thursday. Ingenuity remains in contact with its companion, the Perseverance rover, which has been exploring a dried-up riverbed for signs of extinct Martian life.
Ingenuity will now be left behind.
“It is bittersweet that I must announce that Ingenuity, the little helicopter that could — and it kept saying, ‘I think I can, I think I can’ — well, it has now taken its last flight on Mars,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, announced in a video message posted on X.
Ingenuity arrived on Mars in the undercarriage of the Perseverance rover in February 2021. The helicopter was a late addition to the mission, a low-cost, high-risk, high-reward technology demonstration using many off-the-shelf components, providing important lessons for future mission designers during its 72 flights through the planet’s thin atmosphere.
“They can rely on what we’ve accomplished,” Theodore Tzanetos, the Ingenuity project manager, said in a news conference on Thursday evening. “They can point to the fact that a cellphone processor from 2015 can survive the radiation environment on Mars for two and a half years. Lithium-ion battery cells that are commercial, off the shelf, can survive for two and a half years. Those are massive victories for engineers around NASA.”
On April 19, 2021, Ingenuity became the first plane or helicopter to take off on another planet, the aircraft’s rotors spinning 2,400 times a minute to generate sufficient lift in an atmosphere that is only one one-hundredth as dense as Earth’s. NASA officials called the flight a “Wright brothers moment” for planetary exploration.
The plan then was to conduct a demonstration of the novel technology: five flights in 30 days.
Perseverance was then to leave Ingenuity behind and begin studying ancient sedimentary rocks along the rim of Jezero crater, which held a lake of water several billion years ago.
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