NASA and JPL’s Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars as seen by the Perseverance rover’s Mastcam-Z camera on February 4, 2024.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — Perseverance Rover NASA took a photo of its damaged companion, the Ingenuity helicopter, as it appeared to be sitting alone on a sand dune. In the new photo, the twin-rotor helicopter can be seen motionless over sand dunes in the background, while the barren and rocky Martian landscape fills the foreground.
Photo taken on February 4, 2024 at 13.05 local solar time, approximately two weeks since it experienced damage that ended its mission. Ingenuity suffered damage to its rotors during a flight on January 18, 2024, while landing on the sandy, empty landscape of Mars.
Helicopters typically use landscape features such as rocks to help them navigate, but the 72nd flight found the drone without any visual clues. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is still analyzing damage to Ingenuity’s blades, but regardless of what JPL finds, the helicopter’s mission has officially ended as it can no longer fly.
Ingenuity landed with its companion robot, the Perseverance rover, on February 18, 2021. While flying in the skies of Mars in April 2021, Ingenuity made history by carrying out the first flight of a powered aircraft on another planet.
The Ingenuity-Perseverance duo has been exploring the area known as Jezero Crater ever since, finding signs of ancient bodies of water on the Red Planet that may have hosted life billions of years ago. Ingenuity serves as Perseverance’s scout, identifying interesting areas for the rover to explore.
In the last few weeks….
2024-02-06 08:42:02
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