Originally intended as a short-term tech demo, Ingenuity logged 72 flights over three years. It accumulated more than two hours of flight time, traveling 11 miles. That’s more than 14 times farther than planned
NASA’s little Mars helicopter has flown its last flight.
The space agency announced Thursday that the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) chopper named Ingenuity can no longer fly because of rotor blade damage. While it remains upright and in contact with flight controllers, its $85 million mission is officially over, officials said.
Originally intended as a short-term tech demo, Ingenuity logged 72 flights over three years at Mars. It accumulated more than two hours of flight time, traveling 11 miles (18 kilometers). That’s more than 14 times farther than planned, according to NASA. It soared as high as 79 feet (24 meters) and hit speeds of up to 22.4 mph (36 kph).
“That remarkable helicopter flew higher and farther than we ever imagined,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.
I’m amazed that we could design something that flew at all, given Mars’s atmosphere is something like 1/150th of Earth’s, but the gravity is closer to 1/3. I’m sure many people know this, but one of the bigger bits of scientific fudging in Andy Weir’s The Martian is that a windstorm would fuck up their base like that.
The engineering of the thing is really cool, the rotorblades spin at ten times the rpm needed on earth, and are much larger in terms of surface area.