NASA scientists are close to completing the first-ever accident investigation on another planet. Engineers from NASA’s Southern California Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working with AeroVironment will publish a report on the final flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in the coming weeks.
NASA’a Perseverance and Ingenuity activities on Mars are the kind of basic research and development and pioneering information building blocks on which all future Mars missions will depend for success. Then, when the first private enterprise mission lands on Mars, NASA’s pioneering work having been long forgotten, congratulations will flow along with criticism of NASA by AvWeb commenters for being a bloated incompetent government entity.
“The NTSB did not travel to the scene of the accident.”
But was anyone injured???
There are plenty of books published on slope landings and brownout conditions for helicopters.
What Ingenuity and Perseverance accomplished is nothing short of miraculous, as it reflects NASA’s dedication to space exploration and acquiring knowledge of how to operate in hostile off-world environments. The whole Mars team is to be congratulated. Say what you want, but I’d rather see more money dedicated to NASA’s objective of space exploration and less of our taxes spent to provide free cell phones and the like.
Ginny was a trailblazer, a technological tour-de-force, and anyone who was even remotely 
involved in that project deserves their own page in Wikipedia, imho. Like many great people, she continues to contribute to our understanding, long after she’s gone.
Yeah. Somebody in the control center tripped on the stairs on the way to the bathroom. No, really, everybody aboard died.
To the engineers, scientists, and dreamers behind its success: thank you!
I’d like to see the analysis of NASA costs, losses, timelines, delays, etc against say Elon Musk and SpaceX. He started in 2002 from scratch, reduced costs to a tenth, over 400 launches and now has rocketed past everyone everywhere in everything space. If left to NASA, it would be another 150 years to get where SpaceX is at now at an unimaginable cost all while they pat each other on the back and say how great they are doing…
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