The record-setting Mars helicopter Ingenuity broke during a final, fatal flight.

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 for interplanetary spacecraft. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, built it as a test to see whether powered flight was possible 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 absolutely shattered our paradigm of exploration by introducing this new dimension of aerial mobility,” says Lori Glaze, head of NASA’s planetary sciences division in Washington DC.

Ingenuity was supposed to make only five flights and last about a month, but ultimately it traversed 17 kilometres of the red planet and flew for a total of nearly 129 minutes between 2021 and 2024. During its final journey, something fatal happened — perhaps the rotor blades striking the ground, NASA announced on 25 January. An image that the helicopter took of the ground after the flight ended shows the shadow of one of the blades, with at least one-quarter of it missing. The helicopter can still communicate with Earth, at least for now, but it will not fly again...