NASA Identifies Why Mars Helicopter ‘Ingenuity’ Crashed on Its Final Flight

In this image taken by the Mars Perseverance rover and made available by NASA, the Mars Ingenuity helicopter (R) flies over the surface of the planet on April 30, 2021. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS via AP

Nearly a year after NASA’s helicopter “Ingenuity” crashed on Mars, engineers have identified what they believe went wrong on its final flight.

NASA’s Ingenuity was designed as a technology demonstration experiment to see if the four-pound helicopter could fly in Mars’s thin atmosphere, which is about 1 percent of the density of Earth’s. The rotorcraft became the first powered, controlled aircraft on another planet.