by Saying goodbye is never easy, especially from the world.
The crew of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter assembled for the last time on Tuesday (April 16) to oversee a transmission from the small rotorcraft, the first robot ever to explore the skies of an extraterrestrial world.
The meeting, in a control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, came nearly three months after Ingenuity’s 72nd and final flight. The 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) copper damaged its rotors when it landed that day, consigning it to a fixed life henceforth – but it lives on, as a weather station and technology test bed.
“With apologies to Dylan Thomas, Ingenuity will not be going smoothly into that good Martian night,” Josh Anderson, Ingenuity team leader at JPL, said in a statement.
“It’s almost unbelievable that after more than 1,000 Martian days on the surface, 72 flights, and one rough landing, she still has something to give,” Anderson said. “And thanks to the dedication of this amazing team, Ingenuity not only exceeded our wildest dreams, but also could teach us new lessons for years to come.”
Related: NASA’s Mars Ingenuity helicopter has flown its final flight after suffering rotor damage
Ingenuity landed NASA’s Endurance rover searching for life and collecting samples on the floor of the 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) Jezero Crater in February 2021.
Two months later, the small rotorcraft was deployed from the belly of Endurance and took to the skies of Mars for the first time. Ingenuity flew four more times in quick succession, carrying out its demonstration mission, which aimed to show that air exploration of the Red Planet is possible despite its thin atmosphere.
And Ingenuity did not continue to fly, on an extended mission where the helicopter was a scout for Persistence. Over the course of its 72 Mars flybys, Ingenuity stayed aloft for a total of 129 minutes and covered 10.5 miles (17.0 km) of ground—more than 14 times longer than originally expected, according to NASA officials.
Ingenuity communicates with Earth through persistence, and the large rover will soon pass over the horizon, leaving its small partner behind. Before that happens, the helicopter crew gathered Tuesday to eat some “Final Comms” chocolate cake and review a key transmission sent through Perseverance and NASA’s Deep Space Network.
“The telemetry confirmed that a software update previously up to Ingenuity was functioning as expected,” NASA officials wrote in the same statement. “The new software contains commands that instruct the helicopter to continue collecting data well after communication with the rover has ceased.”
Ingenuity will continue to wake up each day, activating its onboard computers and testing its solar panels, batteries and electronics, NASA officials added. The chopper will also photograph the Martian surface and collect temperature data at its final landing site, which the team calls Valinor Hills.
“Ingenuity engineers and Mars scientists believe that such long-term data collection could not only benefit future designers of aircraft and other vehicles for the Red Planet, but also provide long-term insight into Martian weather patterns and dust movement,” officials wrote. NASA.
Ingenuity will continue this work as long as possible – until something breaks, for example, or dust breaks the solar panels. The mission team believes the chopper’s memory can hold about 20 years’ worth of such data, so Ingenuity could be a valuable resource for Mars explorers years down the road.
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“Whenever humanity visits Valinor Hills – be it with a rover, a new aircraft or future astronauts – Ingenuity will be waiting for its final gift of data, a final testament to why we dare mighty things,” Project Manager Ingenuity Teddy Tzanetos, also of JPL, said in the same statement. “Thank you, Ingenuity, for inspiring a small group of people to overcome insurmountable odds at the limits of space.”
The mission team also received a farewell message from Ingenuity during Tuesday’s meeting – one they sent to Perseverance on Monday (April 15) so the chopper could send it back. This mystery was sentimental rather than functional, reflecting the names of people who worked on the Ingenuity mission over the years, NASA officials said.
