As the ongoing sundial efforts have indicated, 3 of Ingenuity’s rotor blades have lost their tips while the 4th blade separated at the hub and landed on the next hill over to the west. Note the clearly visible counterweight cone on that 4th blade, which might also be missing its tip.
Even though it obviously can’t fly anymore, is there any chance they could drive Perseverance over to it, pick it up and take it to some particularly interesting spot to use Injenuity’s camera and whatever sensors it has to observe whatever?
The terrain (deep sand) is too dangerous for the rover to traverse across (it could get stuck and that would be mission over for the rover) Even if it could traverse across, there is no way to pick up the helicopter. Instead the helicopter will spend the rest of its days waking up every morning and listening for a transmission from the rover for a total of 50 minutes, if it gets no signal during those 50 minutes, it will sleep until the next day and repeat until it is no longer able to wake up. Since flight 72 the Helicopter has sent back over 2,300 images… Link to all those images: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/?begin_sol=1036&end_sol=1136&af=HELI_NAV,HELI_RTE
Gotcha. Sounded like a thought anyways, that sucks, but it is what it is.
Thanks for the detailed comment and the link 👍
No. The rover has no way to pick it up and also the cameras on Ingenuity aren’t any good so it wouldn’t be worth it.
Meh, sounded like a thought, oh well.
I liked it!