The star attraction of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission is the Perseverance rover. But bolted to its underside was a stowaway: A tiny, 19-inch helicopter called Ingenuity. She was intended to fly five times on Mars, as a wild experiment to see if anything could fly in Mars’s incredibly thin atmosphere. But as the speed, altitude, length, and usefulness of Ingenuity’s flights improved, her mission was extended indefinitely. Ingenuity is still flying, nearly a year after its original mission was to end—and now, NASA is designing a new generation of Mars helicopters, based on her unlikely success. In this episode, meet the three engineers who created Ingenuity—and kept her flying against all physical, planetary, and managerial odds.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices