NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was designed to attempt up to five experimental test flights over thirty days. It performed 72 flights over almost three years before rotor blade damage on 18 January 2024 grounded it for good. The follow-on work, inside JPL and at the agency\u2019s industry partners, is now well underway.<\/p>\n
The numbers behind the headline are worth keeping. According to NASA\u2019s end-of-mission release<\/a>, Ingenuity logged more than two hours of total flight time and flew many times farther than the original mission profile contemplated. The helicopter weighed about 1.8 kilograms, cost roughly US$85 million, and was carried to the surface attached to the underside of the Perseverance rover in February 2021. By the end of its life its team described it as the first deep-space mission to fly commercial off-the-shelf cellphone processors.<\/p>\n The atmosphere problem<\/p>\n The reason Ingenuity is worth taking seriously as an engineering result is the atmosphere it flew in. Mars surface pressure is well under one percent of Earth\u2019s. A rotor that lifts a small drone on a still day in Pasadena has to spin much faster, with carefully shaped blades, to lift even a four-pound aircraft on Mars. Ingenuity\u2019s rotors ran at around 2,400 rpm, several times the rate of an equivalent Earth-bound multirotor.<\/p>\n The atmospheric thinness is also why most of Ingenuity\u2019s flights stayed low and short. The aircraft was operating near the edge of what its rotor system could sustain, and team members have said the longest flight, of 704 metres, sat close to the design margins.<\/p>\n What actually ended the mission<\/p>\n Flight 72 was meant to be brief, a vertical hop to check the helicopter\u2019s systems after an emergency landing on Flight 71 in featureless terrain inside Jezero Crater. Ingenuity climbed to 12 metres, hovered, and began to descend. About 19 seconds in, the navigation camera lost the surface texture it needed to track the helicopter\u2019s velocity.<\/p>\n The result was a hard landing on a sand ripple.<\/p>\n