Chocolate cake and Martian dreams: Ingenuity helicopter bids a bittersweet farewell

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, after a remarkable mission on the Red Planet, bids farewell to its active flight operations. Originally designed for short-lived technology demonstrations, Ingenuity defied expectations, operating from the Martian surface for nearly three years. Despite a hard landing on its final flight, the resilient rotorcraft remains a testament to human ingenuity and will now serve as a stationary testbed for future Mars exploration.

Aditya Madanapalle Published: 21 Apr 2024 12:01:PM

Chocolate cake and Martian dreams: Ingenuity helicopter bids a bittersweet farewell

An image of Ingenuity captured by Perseverance, with the rotorcraft on the right, and a piece of one of its blades on the left. (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS).

Key Highlights

Originally planned for up to five experimental test flights over 30 days, Ingenuity surpassed all predictions by flying more than 14 times farther and logging over two hours of flight time.
Throughout its mission, Ingenuity received thousands of electronic postcards filled with wishes from people worldwide via the mission’s website.
The helicopter will remain in the Valinor Hills while Perseverance continues to explore the Jezero Crater.

New Delhi: The Ingenuity ground team has wrapped up the final downlink shift for the mission, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California, USA on 16 April, 2024. The mission had already ended back in January, when Ingenuity broke off a portion of one of its rotor blades during the landing. However, the rotorcraft remained in communications with the Perseverance rover, that continued to relay signals through NASA’s deep space network (DSN). This is the final time that the mission team worked on operating the first powered craft to fly on another world.

Final Comms Chocolate Cake

The team commemorated the final communications from the rotorcraft with chocolate cake. The transmission, from a distance of 304 million kilometres, confirmed that the software update providing new programming to the rotorcraft was working as intended. The team also received a farewell messages with the names of the team members, which had been transmitted to Perseverance by JPL personnel a day in advance. The message was then transmitted to Ingenuity, which then relayed it back to Earth.

The final gathering of the Ingenuity team for its flight operations. (Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech).

Ingenuity’s second life as a stationary testbed

Ingenuity has landed for the final time, but it still has a job to do. The rotorcraft will now serve as a stationary testbed, forever grounded at the site of it’s hard landing, dubbed the ‘Valinor Hills’. Ingenuity will now wake up every day, test the performance of the hardware, capture an image with its colour camera, collect temperature data from its sensors and wind down. The data collected will help improve our understanding of Mars, and help guide future missions to the Red Planet.

The team expects the onboard memory to hold around 20 years of data. A future robotic or crewed mission to the Red Planet can recover the data from Ingenuity. The data collected will remain on board even if the hardware fails in the future, if the data collection stops, or the solar panels accumulate too much dust to generate power. The InSight lander met a similar fate in December 2022.