Final images of Ingenuity reveal an entire blade broke off the helicopter
This new data should help us understand Ingenuity's final moments on Mars.
It makes me sad in ways I cannot put into words but I'm happy to witness such an amazing achievement of science and determination.
It makes me sad to think that Perseverance has to leave Ingenuity behind. They went on this amazing journey together across the stars but now Perseverance has to keep going. I hope they can be reunited one day in the future.
Way to go little buddy. There'll be a monument built around you in the coming years.
Tbf, the little drone had an incredible run, doing dozens of flights when it was originally designed to only do a few. NASA makes some incredibly good designs. I'm really looking forward to their future rovers and aircraft :)
The craziest thing was none of the hardware for Integrity was rated for space, radiation, dust, or mars. The right hardware would have been too heavy. So it basically the guts out of a few year old cellphone strapped to a rotator. Which actually gave it more computing power then all other NASA unmanned missions combined. They genuinely didn't even know if it would survive the trip to Mars.
I imagine the entire RC copter community has ideas on how to jury rig Ingenuity back into flight, while knowing it will only work for like 25 seconds.
It's traditional to try to make one more (usually catastrophic) flight before making a trip to fetch the correct repair parts.
I'm not sure if that tradition holds on Mars, but I look forward to finding out.
This happened last month. On January 6, Ingenuity flew 40 feet (12 meters) skyward but then made an unplanned early landing after just 35 seconds. Twelve days later, operators intended to troubleshoot the vehicle with a quick up-and-down test. Data from the vehicle indicated that it ascended to 40 feet again during this test, but then communications were ominously lost at the end of the flight.
Sounds like NASA is of a similar mindset already.
That's amazing. Thank you.
I suspect the sandy wind either from flight start up, landing, or from the environment probably grinded the blades eventually resulting to this. Still it's impressive that it lasted this long and let's not forget that this thing runs in Linux. Hurray for Linux!
I was wondering if the blade failure caused the emergency landing, or the emergency landing caused the blade failure.
A little of column A and a little of column B.
I can't believe the blade would do that and let the whole helicopter down like that
It's ok we're still flying half a ship
