Somewhere in a cold corner of Mars, a little helicopter from another world bedded down for its final mission: send its last transmission of data back to Earth and then settle down to become a silent sentry on the Red Planet.
"Thank you, Ingenuity, for inspiring a small group of people to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds at the frontiers of space," said NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer and Ingenuity's project manager Teddy Tzanetos.The little copter, which looks like a small toaster with four whirling blades and four spider-like legs, was only meant to last a month and perform a handful of missions, but ended up wildly exceeding its creators' expectations.
Working with NASA's Mars rover Perseverance, it was tasked with doing recon work while also testing its flight ability in the thin and cold atmosphere of Mars — not to mention performing in gravity significantly lower than what we're used to on Earth., landing wrong in the red Martian dirt and snapping off one of its rotor blades. But many of its components are still workable after the crash, ensuring its continued use as a monitor to collect surrounding data for any future explorers.