The helicopter was supposed to be in a museum by now.
One year ago today, the little chopper landed on the floor of Jezero Crater, with NASA's Perseverance rover, to show that aerial exploration is possible on Mars despite the planet's thin atmosphere.
Over the course of five flights, Ingenuity became the first helicopter ever to ply the skies of a world beyond Earth. And then it kept flying, and racked up 19 Red Planet sorties.
Jaakko Karras, Ingenuity deputy operations lead, told Space.com that they are still going strong.
He said that there wasn't a single item that they were getting nervous about.
It is getting harder to fly the helicopter on Mars.
The Ingenuity flew to Mars on Perseverance's belly and was deployed from the life-hunting, sample-caching rover six weeks after touchdown. The helicopter flew beyond Earth for a month.
Ingenuity was included in the aviation history books alongside legends like Orville Wright. The helicopter that flew to Mars had a swatch of fabric from the first powered flights on Earth.
The $85 million mission was supposed to be done after flight number five. NASA granted a mission extension for the solar-powered chopper because it had performed so well.
The limits of Red Planet flight have been pushed by Ingenuity. On sortie number 11 the helicopter covered 1,257 feet of ground, got 39 feet above the red dirt and reached a maximum speed of 11 mph. Ingenuity had not reached those marks on its first five flights.
12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover's 1st year on Mars.
Perseverance is getting help from the rotorcraft on these longer, more ambitious jaunts to help plan routes and scope out potential science targets. Perseverance's handler decided not to send the six-wheeled robot into theRaised Ridges area because of Ingenuity.
Kevin Hand of JPL, the co-leader of Perseverance's first science campaign, told Space.com that the team still had great debates about real science value.
The little engine that could was marveled at by Hand.
When we passed the initial expected lifetime, we were like, "Maybe it will still be going in the fall", he said.
The Mars Perseverance rover is on the Red Planet.
It has not been a smooth sailing for Ingenuity. The helicopter failed to transition to flight mode as planned in the leadup to its first-ever sortie, pushing that historic liftoff back by about a week.
The first attempt at flight number 14 was aborted after the chopper detected anomalies in two of its six flight-control servo motors. A big dust storm on Mars delayed flight 19 more than a month.
Such issues are expected on a planetary exploration mission that has new technologies and new capabilities. Ingenuity has powered through all of them to date, suggesting that the future is very bright for aerial exploration on Mars.
You may think that the future is far off.
We have already kicked off early efforts to look into how Ingenuity, or Ingenuity-like platforms, scale to do things like carry science payloads, how they might be autonomously self-sustaining, and not attached to a rover.
Mike Wall is the author of Out There, a book about the search for alien life. You can follow him on social media. Follow us on social media.
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