When you purchase through connection on our web site , we may make an affiliate direction . Here ’s how it work .
raw images fromNASA ’s Ingenuity Mars chopper bring out how badly the craft ’s rotor coil blades were damage follow its final , mission - end escape on Jan. 18 .
The images , taken with Ingenuity ’s high - answer navigation camera andshared by NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratoryon Jan. 25 , show the shadows of Ingenuity ’s spinning rotor coil blades being project on the moth-eaten Martian terrain below . The photo reveal sharp breaks at the tips of at least two of Ingenuity ’s four carbon fiber blades , with chunk of the material clearly missing .
The shadow of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter shows clear damage to the carbon fiber rotor blades. A small piece of rotor lies on the ground to the right.
Some of the images also show what look to be small , impoverished piece of rotor lying on the ground nearby . ( front for a small blue chunk to the right field of the rotor ’s shadow in the mental image above ) .
Ingenuity — a some 4 - British pound ( 1.8 kilograms ) automatic helicopter first deploy toMarsin 2021 — get fatal rotor coil impairment at the end of its 72nd flight over the Red Planet , when it circumstantially lost contact with NASA at an altitude of roughly 3 feet ( 1 m ) . While NASA quickly re - established contact with the copter after it made a hard emergency landing , it soon became clear that Ingenuity would never be able to fly again .
Related : NASA ’s Curiosity rover photograph iconic ' Star Trek ' symbolic representation on Mars , thrilling scientists
This image shows a clear break in another of Ingenuity’s rotor blades. Two of the helicopter’s four blades were damaged in a hard landing, NASA said.
Sadly , scientists will never know incisively what happened during those final moments due to a data loss at the mo of the chopper ’s landing place , ingeniousness project managerTeddy Tzanetossaid in a NASA live current on Jan. 31 .
" Our hypothesis here is ground contact , " Tzanetos said . " At some point we had contact with our rotor coil blades with the control surface . "
— Mars is spinning quicker , and scientists are n’t sure why
— Scientists finally puzzle out mystery of strongest Marsquake ever detected
— Mars may be slowly ripping its tumid lunation apart
This sudden hurt marks a semisweet oddment to Ingenuity ’s long - widen mission on Mars . First deployed with the Perseverance rover in February 2021 , Ingenuity was designed to test NASA ’s technology in a series of five flights . The helicopter quickly whizz along through its initial object , ultimately clocking nearly 128 minutes of flight time on Mars during 72 flight fill out over three year .
In its latter years , the helicopter served as a scout for the Perseverance bird of passage , which continues to abrade the Red Planet in search of geologicalclues of past life on Mars . The rover serve as a communications relay between NASA and Ingenuity ; when Perseverance eventually drives out of range of Ingenuity , NASA will no longer be able to pass on with the downed helicopter , Tzanetos read .
