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From the article:

  The Perseverance rover is currently too far away to attempt to image the helicopter at its final airfield.
I wonder if the rover couldn't proceed to the location of the helicopter and get some high res images for diagnostic purposes. I'm sure they considered that option so maybe the rover's schedule is just too busy to accommodate such a mission.

Anyway, R.I.P. Ingenuity and kudos to Nasa for another excellent piece of tech that lasted on another planet for years longer than originally planned.




Rover time and mission resources are definitely limited and a concern, but apparently the location of the copter is also really inconvenient to access. Its sitting down in a valley middle of big sand ripple field. So its not clear if the rover could reach there even if they wanted to.

That being said, not all hope is lost. While closeups are unlikely, the rover is driving in that general direction so there is (very slight) possibility to catch the copter in some lucky drive-by pic from a distance.


Also the rover is really, really slow - a few hundred meters on a good day.




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