After bravely flitting about the Martian landscape like an overachieving drone on Red Bull, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter appears to have suffered what might be diplomatically described as a rough landing, although the laws of physics might instead call it a crash. The plucky little flyer, which had vastly outstripped its five-flight original mission by pulling off 72 flights, is now believed to have clipped one of its rotor blades during its most recent descent on January 18.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the project’s very serious and very smart operators, confirmed that contact had been lost during Flight 72 after the chopper completed 1,227 feet in distance and was supposed to land after about 135 seconds. Three days of deep space silence followed, until the Perseverance rover, which doubles as a helicopter landing pad and emergency radio relay station, managed to hear from Ingenuity again. It was, however, the Martian equivalent of a text reading “We need to talk.”
A subsequent image from the rover painted a rather tilted picture. One rotor blade appeared suspiciously shorter than its lifelong partner, prompting the suspicion that, somewhere in the thin Martian air, a bit of unlucky physics had occurred, likely while Ingenuity was coming in to land. NASA did not use the word “crash” per se but rather offered the more poetic option “may have incurred damage during landing” which translates roughly to “we think it bonked the ground and part of it came off.”
Teddy Tzanetos, the Ingenuity project manager, did the equivalent of sending a respectful nod to a fallen comrade, remarking that it was incredibly impressive that a helicopter made with off-the-shelf parts and intended for a month-long mission had managed to make nearly six dozen flights across rough terrain 140 million miles from the nearest repair shop. “The historic journey of Ingenuity, the first aircraft on another planet, has come to end” he said, perhaps already thinking of a very detailed engineering postmortem.
Still, in a time when most Earth-bound drones struggle to survive a backyard flight without swatting into a tree, Ingenuity’s record of soaring above alien sands for almost three full years remains nothing short of extraordinary.
Martian gravity giveth, and Martian rocks taketh away.