NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter has officially ended its mission after nearly three years, the space agency said Thursday.
The aircraft, which hitched a ride to the Red Planet on the Perseverance rover, sustained damage to its rotor blades while landing during its last flight. It is now no longer capable of flight.
The Ingenuity team scheduled a brief vertical flight for the helicopter on January 18 to assess its location after an emergency landing. However, during the flight, Ingenuity lost contact with Perseverance, which served as a communications relay for the rotor. The cause of the communications dropout that led to the damage during landing is being investigated.
As the first aircraft to operate on another planet, Ingenuity performed 72 flights and flew nearly 14 times farther than originally planned, and its mission of almost 1,000 Martian days was 33 times longer than originally planned. Its original intention was to prove flight was possible in Mars’ ultra-thin atmosphere, but it went on to act as an aerial scout to assist its robot rover companion.
Ingenuity’s endurance surpassed expectations because it was reliant on a solar-powered heating system to protect it during harsh, cold Martian nights.
"It is bittersweet that I must announce that Ingenuity, the little helicopter that could ... has now taken its last flight on Mars," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a video message.
"Like the Wright brothers, what they did back here on Earth at the early part of the last century, Ingenuity has paved the way for future flight in our solar system, and it's leading the way for smarter, safer human missions to Mars and beyond."
The Ingenuity team will conduct final tests on the helicopter’s systems and retrieve the remaining imagery and data stored in Ingenuity's onboard memory.
Some information for this report came from NASA, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
