Last week, NASA’s Perseverance rover spotted its companion, the downed Ingenuity helicopter, in its final resting place amongst a sea of sand ripples on Mars. The aircraft had suffered irreparable damage in a rough landing, but before that, it had snapped a breathtaking view of the Martian landscape with wind-strewn dunes reaching out towards a field of rocky hilltops.
Although the craft will never take flight again, it was a symbol of the “ingenuity” that’s surging through the space industry at the moment. The atmosphere on Mars is a hundred times lighter than on Earth, making flight on the red planet a completely different engineering challenge. Initially, the goal of the Ingenuity project was to build an aircraft that would fly at least once. In the end, the helicopter took 72 flights on Mars.
Now, the Perseverance rover will continue its search for evidence of life without Ingenuity, but it won’t …