The four-pound helicopter first took to the skies in April 2021 when it rose to about 10 feet, hovered, turned and then landed softly back on the surface in what NASA called “a Wright Brothers moment.”
NASA was planning to fly it just five times over a period of 30 days. Instead, it flew 72 times, an extraordinary feat considering the Martian atmosphere is just 1 percent the density of Earth’s, making it difficult to generate lift.
On its most recent flight Jan. 18, however, one or more of its blades, designed to spin at 2,500 rotations per minute, “sustained damage during landing, and it is no longer capable of flight,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement. It added that Ingenuity remained upright and was in communication with controllers on the ground.
In a video message posted on X, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson eulogized the small drone and praised its endurance. “It acted as a scout for the Perseverance rover — it would go and check out sites,” he said. “Ingenuity demonstrated how flight can enhance operational missions, and it’s helping us in the search for life on Mars.”
Ingenuity flew to Mars tethered to the underbelly of Perseverance, the SUV-sized rover that touched down on Mars in February 2021, after traveling some 300 million miles over seven months.
While Perseverance was the star of the mission, Ingenuity was “built as an experiment,” Lori Glaze, the director of NASA’s planetary science division, told The Washington Post in 2022. As a result, it didn’t “have the flight-qualified parts that we use on the big missions like Perseverance.” Engineers even used components from smartphones that they bought off the shelf. And going into the first flight, there “was a risk that it wasn’t going to work,” she said.
But as Ingenuity kept going, flight after flight, on longer and longer journeys, scientists at NASA began to see it as an important tool for exploring Mars. Over the past three years, the helicopter traversed craters and took photos of regions that would have been hard to reach on the ground. It survived harsh dust storms and frigid nights, proving to be surprisingly resilient.
“I am really thrilled to say Ingenuity absolutely shattered our paradigm of exploration, introducing this new dimension of aerial mobility,” Glaze said during a briefing with reporters Thursday.
Along the way, it overcame several technical problems. On one early flight, because of a computer issue, it looked like it was tipsy, “adjusting its velocity and tilting back and forth in an oscillating pattern,” NASA said in a blog post at the time
Another time, it detected an engine issue and did not fly, waiting for ground controllers to fix it.
The more it flew, the more confidence NASA had in it, flying it faster and farther, and over more challenging terrain. Its ninth flight, for example, was “a nail biter,” as NASA said, because it flew over a crater. That required flight controllers to reduce its speed and for engineers to tweak the navigation algorithm. The flight was a success, and Ingenuity was able to beam back colored photos of the region, including a location that some think “may record some of the deepest water environments in old Lake Jezero,” NASA wrote.
In all, it spent more than 128 minutes in flight, covering 11 miles and hitting a maximum ground speed of just over 22 mph, NASA said.
Nelson said its contributions would long be remembered. “Ingenuity has paved the way for future flight in our solar system, and it’s leading the way for smarter, safer human missions to Mars, and beyond,” he said.
