Resourcefulness, the NASA helicopter flying over the Red Planet, ends its mission

Ingenuity, the little Mars helicopter that could do that, is no longer possible.

At least one rotor broke last week during the robotic flying machine's most recent flight, NASA officials announced Thursday. Ingenuity remains in contact with its companion, the Perseverance rover, which has been examining a dried-up riverbed for signs of extinct life on Mars.

Ingenuity will now lag behind.

“It's bittersweet that I have to announce that Ingenuity, the little helicopter that could do that – and he kept saying, 'I think I can do it, I think I can do it' – has now made its final flight on Mars,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, announced in posted a video message to X.

Ingenuity arrived on Mars in February 2021 on the undercarriage of the Perseverance rover. The rover dropped Ingenuity to the ground, and on April 19, 2021, Ingenuity became the first aircraft or helicopter to take off from another planet, with the aircraft's rotors spinning. 2,400 times per second to generate enough lift in an atmosphere that is only one-hundredth the density of Earth. NASA officials called the flight a “Wright Brothers moment” for planetary exploration.

The plan then was to give a demonstration of the new technology: five flights in 30 days.

Perseverance would then leave ingenuity behind and begin studying ancient sedimentary rocks along the rim of the Jezero Crater, which contained a lake of water several billion years ago.

Ingenuity succeeded on the five flights, and it worked so well that mission managers decided to take the helicopter to explore the terrain ahead of the rover.

Over the next thousand days, Ingenuity kept going up and down, up and down, up and down. The aircraft encountered problems en route and made three emergency landings. It survived dust storms and the cold Martian winter for which the plane was not designed. Engineers upgraded the software to allow Ingenuity to choose its own landing sites.

On January 18, during its 72nd flight, Ingenuity lost contact with Perseverance during descent, about three feet above the surface. Communications were restored the next day, but photographs taken a few days later revealed the damaged rotor blade.

The Ingenuity team will run some final tests on Ingenuity's systems and download the images and data still in the helicopter's memory.

NASA engineers are investigating what caused the communications loss and whether the rotor blade hit the ground when Ingenuity landed.

This is a developing story and will be updated.