NASA officially announced the end of flight operations for its small helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity, after it suffered irreparable damage to its rotor blades. The US space agency confirmed that the $85 million mission had come to an end despite the device remaining upright and in communication with flight controllers. Ingenuity, which exceeded initial expectations in both duration and range, arrived on the red planet aboard the Perseverance rover in 2021. Over three years, Ingenuity carried out 72 flights, accumulating more than two hours in the air and covering a distance of approximately 18 kilometers, which is more than fourteen times the distance initially planned.
The success of Ingenuity demonstrated that powered flight is possible in the thin Martian atmosphere, opening the way to new exploration methodologies on the planet. During its last flight, damage to one or more of its blades was detected, making any future takeoff impossible. Although the helicopter managed to ascend to around 12 meters and stay in the air for a few seconds before descending, it lost contact with Perseverance, its communication relay, and the damage was later confirmed after recovering communication. NASA is still investigating the cause of this loss of communication.
Despite the end of the mission, Ingenuity’s outstanding performance has motivated NASA to plan to include two mini helicopters in future missions to Mars. The technological challenge represented by this project was considerable, given the Martian atmosphere’s density, which is barely 1% of that of the Earth. The success of Ingenuity’s flight was greeted with joy among the control team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, who had to wait more than three hours to confirm the success of the mission due to the distance of 287 million kilometers that separate Earth from Mars.
The end of Ingenuity’s mission marks the conclusion of a successful project that took more than six years to develop and contemplates up to five flights of increasing ambition, which could lead the way for a fleet of Martian drones in the coming decades. These technologies promise not only to expand our exploration capacity on Mars but also on Earth, facilitating navigation in difficult-to-access areas such as the Himalayas.