Ingenuity's last landing
Airfield Chi · flight 72, January 2024 · on Mars, 18.50° N, 77.32° E
Where the Mars helicopter Ingenuity made its last landing, on sand ripples in Jezero crater. Perseverance photographed it here from a distance, and one broken rotor blade lying about 15 m away.
What is there
Ingenuity (Mars Helicopter, NASA/JPL)
The first aircraft to fly on another world: 72 flights and 18 km in the air over almost three years, when it was meant to make five. On its last flight it came down hard on a sand ripple and broke a rotor blade; it sits here, tilted, still working as a weather station.
Ingenuity's lost blade (Rotor blade piece, NASA/JPL)
A piece of one of Ingenuity's rotor blades, thrown off in its last landing and spotted by Perseverance from 450 m away. Engineers think the helicopter lost track of the featureless sand ripples below, came down too fast and struck the blades on the ground. Its rotor spun at 2,400 turns a minute to bite into air 100 times thinner than Earth's.
Stand at Ingenuity's last landing in Stellingo: the ground is shaped from orbiter elevation maps and photos, the hardware is placed where it really is, and the sky above — the Sun, the Earth, the stars — is the real one, at any date you choose.