"She still has one final gift for us, which is that she's now going to continue on as a weather station of sorts."

Relying on remote data, including photographs taken after the flight, the investigators believe that “navigation errors created high horizontal velocities at touchdown,” which most likely resulted in Ingenuity experiencing a “hard impact on the sand ripple’s slope,” causing it to pitch and roll.

"When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don't have any black boxes!" NASA's Håvard Grip said.

Imagine how much more difficult it would be to diagnose a helicopter accident that took place 69 million miles away with none of the usual data present to help. NASA had to do just that after its Ingenuity Mars Helicopter suffered an accident on Jan.

After over 70 flights, the Ingenuity helicopter — the first craft to ever make a powered, controlled flight on another planet — crashed in the Martian dunes in January 2024. But its unexpected achievement (engineers hoped it might make five flights) has prompted the conceptual design and planning for what the agency calls its "Mars Chopper."

Ingenuity was designed to perform up to five experimental test flights over 30 days but managed to operate for almost three years, performing 72 flights.