The NASA helicopter Ingenuity on Mars made the first powered controlled flights by an aircraft on a planet other than Earth.
[4] It was built and operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a field center of NASA.
Ingenuity was designed to fly five times in 30 Mars sols (31 Earth days), but operated far above expectations, making its 72nd and final flight on January 18, 2024 (UTC), 977 Mars sols (1,004 Earth days) after its first flight.
Its rotor blades were damaged on the last flight's landing, causing NASA to retire the craft.
[5][6] Mission engineers determined that Ingenuity’s navigation system could not provide accurate data during the flight over featureless terrain, resulting in an off-balance hard landing.
[95] Photography by Perseverance from only 23 m (75 ft) away, its closest approach in two years, showed dust build-up on the helicopter rotor blades and solar panel.