NASA shows how Mars helicopter did the impossible, and then crashed

NASA hoped its Ingenuity helicopter would fly at least once. It took flight 72 times.

The historic craft — the first to ever make a powered, controlled flight on another planet — flew distances as far as 2,315 feet across Mars' Jezero Crater, a basin that once teemed with water, likely creating a lake some 22 miles wide. It served as a reliable scout to the space agency's Perseverance rover, as these robots sleuthed the best places to look for potential evidence of past microbial life on the Red Planet.