It’s not always up to us humans to decide with whom or what to develop an emotional bond. Maybe that’s why learning that NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter project is coming to an end feels a lot like learning about the death of a well-liked celebrity.
Ingenuity is not exactly Mathew Perry in terms of its popularity, but you cannot deny its contributions to humanity’s spaceflight ambitions. It hitched a ride to Mars inside the belly of the Perseverance Rover and landed there on February 18, 2021. Its first flight happened on April 19 that year, making history as the first time-powered controlled flight has been achieved on a world that is not the Earth.
The sols won’t be the same without the #MarsHelicopter.#ThanksIngenuity, for being my partner in exploration from the very beginning. https://t.co/mFAg7Lwxnp pic.twitter.com/uoi4bXXa9Y
— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) January 25, 2024
It was originally designed as a technology demonstration that would perform up to five experimental flights over a period of 30 days. At the time, achieving that much would have been a massive accomplishment. But nearly three years later, the rotorcraft continued to perform a total of 72 flights, and it flew more than 14 times farther than planned and logged a total of two hours of flight time. All this while, it was acting as an aerial scout for the Perseverance rover. Perhaps, that would have been a better name for the helicopter.
But all things, good or bad, have to come to an end. The Ingenuity team at NASA was planning to make a short vertical hop on January 18 to determine its exact location after a previous flight ended in an emergency landing. Telemetry data from the helicopter showed that it achieved its maximum altitude of 12 metres and hovered there for 4.5 seconds before it started coming down at a speed of about one metre per second.
But just when it was about a metre above the surface, it lost contact with Perseverance. And since the rover acts as a relay between the helicopter and Earth, it meant that mission controllers lost communications with Ingenuity. They got back in touch the very next day, and more information about the flight was relayed back to controllers on Earth.
New images confirm the #MarsHelicopter sustained rotor damage during Flight 72. Our helicopter has flown its final flight.
Ingenuity defied the odds and captured our hearts. #ThanksIngenuity for showing us what’s possible when we dare mighty things. https://t.co/KC2atKpB8k pic.twitter.com/tLw5I3cKmH
— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) January 25, 2024
But images of the helicopter taken by Perseverance showed that one of its rotor blades took damage while landing and is no longer capable of flight. NASA is still investigating the cause of the communications dropout and the helicopter’s orientation at the time of touchdown. But the agency does confirm one thing — Ingenuity’s mission on Mars is over.
Not too far from what is most probably Ingenuity’s final resting place, the Perseverance rover continues its job. What is its job, you may ask? Well, one of its key “responsibilities” is to look for signs of life in the red planet’s past and, indeed, present.
A team of researchers led by UCLA and the University of Oslo on Friday published an article in the journal Science Advances where they confirmed the presence of an ancient lake in the Jezero crater where both the rover and the helicopter are. The research shows that at some point, the crater filled with water and deposited layers of sediments on the floor. This lake may have then shrank, and the sediments that carried the river that fed it would have formed an enormous delta. The lake’s dissipation over time would have been accompanied by the erosion of sediments in the crater, and that would have formed the geologic features visible on the surface.
The scientists were able to glean all of this with data from Perseverance’s ground-penetrating radar, which revealed aeons of environmental changes. The rover is also collecting rock and soil samples that NASA hopes to return to Earth during a future mission. The confirmation of lake sediments on the planet gives hope that these samples could hold traces of life.
