Crash Landing on Mars: NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter’s Close Call

Mars is hard, even for robots.

NASA’s experimental helicopter Ingenuity crashed in January, bringing the historic extraterrestrial mission to an end. The Martian craft — the first to ever make a powered, controlled flight on another planet — flew 72 times before it landed “hard” in the sand-covered plains of a dried-up river valley.

Early photos showed some damage to Ingenuity’s rotors. Now, new imagery captured by the space agency’s Perseverance rover reveals that the rough descent completely snapped off one of the helicopter’s essential rotors. The NASA imagery below was processed and enhanced by the geovisual designer Simeon Schmauß.

In the first image snapped by the nearby Perseverance rover, you can see Ingenuity on the right, with its remaining four-foot-long rotors. Many yards away, on the left, is the detached rotor, lying in the Martian sand.

“One rotor blade is broken off completely, the others have damaged tips,” Schmauß wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

The Ingenuity helicopter (on right), with a broken-off rotor to the left of center in the image.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / LANL / CNES / IRAP / Simeon Schmauß

A close-up of the damaged Mars’ Ingenuity helicopter.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / LANL / CNES / IRAP / Simeon Schmauß

This smooth, sandy terrain was ultimately Ingenuity’s demise. The helicopter navigated by using software to track the movement of objects, like rocks, below. But the sandy terrain was largely “featureless,” NASA explained.

“The more featureless the terrain is, the harder it is for Ingenuity to successfully navigate across it,” the space agency said in a statement. “The team believes that the relatively featureless terrain in this region was likely the root cause of the anomalous landing.”

Ingenuity’s mission, however, was hugely successful. It proved that flight in extremely daunting Martian conditions — a profoundly thin atmosphere (just one percent the volume of Earth‘s) where it’s challenging to create lift — was possible. The helicopter also proved a valuable “scout” for the car-sized Perseverance rover as it scoured the dry, irradiated Mars desert for any hints of past, primitive life — should any have ever existed.

In the coming decades, NASA may even fly a plane over Mars — an innovative double-winged craft inspired by Ingenuity’s achievements on the forbidding Red Planet.