The amazing helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity, will fly no more

Ingenuity has spent more than two hours flying above Mars since April 2021.

Something has gone wrong with NASA's Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars. Although the US space agency has not made any public announcements yet, a source told Ars that the plucky flying vehicle had an accident on its last flight and broke one of its blades. It will not fly anymore. (Shortly after this article was published, NASA confirmed the end of Ingenuity's mission).

When it launched to Mars more than three years ago, the small Ingenuity helicopter was an experimental mission, a challenge to NASA engineers to see if they could devise and build a vehicle that could make a powered flight on another world.

This was especially difficulty on Mars, which has a very thin atmosphere, with a pressure of less than 1 percent that of Earth's. The solution they landed on was a very light 4-lb helicopter with four blades. It was hoped that Ingenuity would make a handful of flights and provide NASA with some valuable testing data.

But it turns out that Ingenuity had other ideas. Since its deployment from the Perseverance rover in April 2021, the helicopter has flown a staggering 72 flights. It has spent more than two hours—128.3 minutes, to be precise—flying through the thin Martian air. Over that time, it flew 11 miles, or 17 km, performing invaluable scouting and scientific investigations. It has been a huge win for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the greatest spaceflight stories of this decade.

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