NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, the first aircraft to fly on another world, has died. It perished on 18 January during its 72nd flight in Jezero Crater on Mars. Ingenuity was nearly three years old (if you count its time on the red planet). The helicopter, a box-shaped drone with a pair of 1.2-metre-long carbon-fibre blades, was a trailblazer of interplanetary spacecraft. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, built it as a test to see if it was possible to conduct powered flight in the thin atmospheres of other worlds. It accompanied NASA's Perseverance rover to Mars, where both landed in February 2021 and began studying Jezero. Ingenuity was supposed to make only five flights and last about a month, but it ultimately traversed 17 kilometres of the red planet and flew for a total of nearly 129 minutes between 2021 and 2024. During its final journey, though, something fatal happened ' perhaps the rotor blades striking the ground, NASA announced on 25 January....
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