# Mars helicopter Ingenuity’s final resting place named after ‘Undying Lands’ in ‘Lord of the Rings’
Like some hobbits, a tiny Martian helicopter received a special honor. The final resting place of NASA’s Ingenuity, now has a new name bestowed from fans of fantasy. NASA officials revealed on Monday that the Ingenuity team has nicknamed the spot where the helicopter completed its final flight ‘Valinor Hills’ after the fictional location in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novels, including ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy.
Valinor was a part of the Undying Lands, a location often cited in Tolkien’s mythology. The most-cited reference to those islands comes at the end of LOTR. According to a 2009 paper in the peer-reviewed journal “Mythlore ” led by Keith Kelly, of Pennsylvania’s Kutztown University, the Undying Lands are a point of eternal refuge and rest. The informal name for the location used by NASA engineers for navigation and honorific purposes is apt for Ingenuity, which made 72 flights since alighting on the surface of Mars with its robotic companion, the Perseverance rover, on Feb. 18, 2021.
The helicopter’s flying days are over after engineers spotted damage to the blades, making it incapable of flying again. However, it can still transmit engineering data to Perseverance so long as the rover remains within range. Perseverance, on the other hand, will continue to prioritize its mission of collecting samples for a possible Mars sample return mission (MSR) in the 2030s. That means that sooner or later, the rover will move away from the grounded Ingenuity and leave the flying sentinel silent, marking the end of the drone’s mission.
NASA does plan to continue deploying flying sentinels on future missions, including two fetch helicopters on the MSR mission plan. But that’s assuming that ongoing budgetary woes for the program can be overcome quickly. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages Ingenuity and MSR, slashed 8% of its workforce this week due to Congressional uncertainty about NASA’s budget and MSR.
