NASA on Thursday said its history-making Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s mission has come to an end after its rotor blades took on damage during landing. It was originally designed as a technology demonstration to complete five test flights over 30 days but it far exceeded that expectation by completing 72 flights over a period of three years. “The historic journey of Ingenuity, the first aircraft on another planet, has come to end. That remarkable helicopter flew higher and farther than we ever imagined and helped NASA do what we do best – make the impossible possible. Through missions like Ingenuity, NASA is paving the way for future flight in our solar system and smarter, safer human exploration to Mars and beyond,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a press statement. The rotorcraft landed on Mars on February 18, 2021, secured within the Perseverance rover. It took off on its first flight on April 19 that year, marking the first time that any aircraft achieved powered controlled flight on a world other than Earth. It dispatched its next four flights quickly as well, completing its original mission. After that, NASA engineers began using Ingenuity as an aerial scout for the Perseverance rover. Fast forward to 2024, the Ingenuity team at the space agency was planning to make a short vertical hop on January 18 to determine its exact location after an emergency landing during a previous flight. Telemetry data showed that it achieved its maximum altitude of 12 metres and hovered for 4.5 seconds before it started descending with a velocity of about one metre per second. But once the helicopter was about a metre above the surface, it lost contact with Perseverance. Since Perseverance acts as a communication relay between the helicopter and Earth, this meant that mission controllers lost touch with the rotorcraft. Communications were reestablished the following day. Images of Ingenuity taken by Perseverance reveal revealed the damage to the rotorblade but the reason for the communication dropouts and the orientation of the rotorcraft at the time of touchdown are still being investigated to find out exactly what happened.
