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Let's go to Mars

Ingenuity flies, then breaks its blades on a dune

A 1.8 kg helicopter hovered three metres above Jezero for forty seconds. Seventy-two flights later, featureless sand confused its navigation camera and damaged all four blades.

A small helicopter hovers above a rocky Martian plain, its two rotors stacked one above the other and blurred into discs, a flat solar panel on top and a boxy body carried on four thin splayed legs. Behind it a long, low dune ridge crosses the frame under a pale butterscotch sky, and the foreground is rippled sand strewn with pebbles and small rocks.
Ingenuity on its 54th flight, 3 August 2023, a short pop-up hover at 5 metres above the floor of Jezero Crater to check the helicopter's navigation system. The frame comes from video shot by Perseverance's Mastcam-Z imager from about 55 metres away. · Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

On 19 April 2021 a 1.8-kilogram helicopter climbed three metres, hovered for thirty seconds and set back down, 39.1 seconds in all. It was the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another world. NASA had funded Ingenuity as a technology demonstration because nobody could promise the air was thick enough.

Mars's surface atmosphere is about one percent as dense as Earth's at sea level, the equivalent of flying at 30,500 metres, more than twice the altitude any helicopter has reached here. A rotor in that air produces almost no lift, so Ingenuity used four blades in two counter-rotating 1.2-metre rotors at roughly 2,400 rpm, close to ten times a terrestrial helicopter's main rotor. The rest was as light as possible: a paperback-sized solar panel, a commercial smartphone processor, consumer-grade cameras and inertial sensors. NASA spent about 80 million dollars building it and 5 million flying it. The plan was five flights in thirty days.

It flew for nearly three years: seventy-two flights, 2 hours 8 minutes 48 seconds of airtime, 17.0 kilometres covered, a maximum altitude of 24 metres and a top speed of 36 kilometres per hour. Perseverance's science team used it to photograph outcrops and scout driving routes days ahead of the rover.

Flight 72, on 18 January 2024, was a short hop to check the systems after an emergency landing on the previous flight. Ingenuity navigated by pointing a camera at the ground and tracking surface features frame to frame. Over sand ripples with almost no texture, its horizontal velocity estimate drifted, and it came down hard and sideways. A navigation image afterwards showed the shadow of a damaged blade. All four snapped about a third of the way in from the tip, and vibration tore the remainder of one off at the root; a blade fragment was later spotted some fifteen metres away. Contact was reestablished the next day, and NASA declared the mission over on 25 January 2024.

Ingenuity is still upright on the floor of Jezero. In April 2024 engineers reprogrammed it as a stationary station that wakes daily to log temperatures and track how its solar panel and batteries are ageing. Its memory holds about twenty years of that, and Perseverance will eventually drive out of radio range.