Yeah but it STILL landed right-side up. A fine example for moon landers everywhere.
It makes me sad in ways I cannot put into words but I’m happy to witness such an amazing achievement of science and determination.
Way to go little buddy. There’ll be a monument built around you in the coming years.
Tbf, the little drone had an incredible run, doing dozens of flights when it was originally designed to only do a few. NASA makes some incredibly good designs. I’m really looking forward to their future rovers and aircraft :)
The craziest thing was none of the hardware for Integrity was rated for space, radiation, dust, or mars. The right hardware would have been too heavy. So it basically the guts out of a few year old cellphone strapped to a rotator. Which actually gave it more computing power then all other NASA unmanned missions combined. They genuinely didn’t even know if it would survive the trip to Mars.
