Perseverance Rover

Like the Junocam they tried to kill ingenuity but like the Junocam it proved to be quite useful and valuable.
 
Opposition to Ingenuity

The idea to include a helicopter in the Mars 2020 mission was opposed by several people. Up until the end of the 2010s, several NASA leaders, scientists and JPL employees argued against integrating a helicopter into the mission. For three years, the future Ingenuity was developed outside the Mars 2020 project and its budget.[60][61] And although NASA management accepted assurances in the spring of 2018 that the addition of a helicopter would not harm the goals of the expedition, Mars 2020 chief scientist, Kenneth Farley, stated "I have personally been opposed to it because we are working very hard for efficiencies and spending 30 days working on a technology demonstration does not further those goals directly from the science point of view".[62] Farley was convinced that the helicopter was a distraction from the priority scientific tasks, unacceptable even for a short time.[62]

The skepticism on the part of NASA leadership was not unfounded. Scientists, engineers and managers proceeded from a pragmatic comparison of the benefits of additional aerial reconnaissance with the costs that inevitably fall on the schedule for the rover to complete all the tasks assigned to it. During a live-stream from NASA, MiMi Aung, the Ingenuity Project Manager, and Jennifer Trosper discussed the value of Ingenuity. Trosper argued that the rover would outpace the helicopter due to its auto-navigation capability, thus negating one of central arguments for the value to the mission of the helicopter. During the operations on Mars, Tosper was shown to be correct when, in the spring of 2022, at the beginning of Sol 400 the helicopter fell behind the rover.
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There were a number senior management personnel who opposed the Ingenuity helicopter for several reasons, fortunately they were circumvented and Ingenuity's performance on Mars well beyond its' designers expectations proved these opponents wrong.
 
NMaude said:
Opposition to Ingenuity

There were a number senior management personnel who opposed the Ingenuity helicopter for several reasons, fortunately they were circumvented and Ingenuity's performance on Mars well beyond its' designers expectations proved these opponents wrong.
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No, Ingenuity's performance had nothing to do with it. Whether it worked or not had no bearing on the matter. The issue was accommodating the helicopter and the risk it posed to the rover.
 
Ingenuity was kinda cherry on the cake, but the real deal with that mission was a) the rover and b) Mars Sample Return: caching samples.
These two could not be allowed to fail... and even less because of a smallish helicopter drone.

My understanding is that the emplacement of the helicopter below the rover (to be dropped before deployment and flight) could have wrecked the rover if the drop had not happened because of some glitch. End result: the loss a $billion nuclear rover (and a slice of future MSR) to a tiny drone helicopter. That was found to be pretty unacceptable risk.

The helicopter supporters took note of that, and then successfully fought back. In the end everybody was happy: rover worked, did his slice of MSR, while the helicopter flew 72 times rather than 5 planned.

But space exploration history is littered with "no happy ending" failures...
 
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See Ingenuity’s Flight Map: 72 Helicopter Flights on Mars

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7DFnNimSfw


Apr 18, 2024
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter became the first vehicle to achieve powered, controlled flight on another planet when it took to the Martian skies on April 19, 2021. This video maps the location of the 72 flights that the helicopter took over the course of nearly three years. Ingenuity far surpassed expectations — soaring higher and faster than previously imagined.

Designed to be a technology demonstration that would make no more than five test flights in 30 days, Ingenuity eventually flew more than 14 times farther than the distance expected, and logged more than two hours of total flight time. It flew for the final time on Jan. 18, 2024.

For more information on Ingenuity, visit: go.nasa.gov/ingenuity.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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