Perseverances had repeated run-ins with debris from the spacecraft landing system, so maybe it was predictable that it would happen to ingenuity. But no one would have guessed how it would play out on this episode of Mars Guy. Let's start by acknowledging what an engineering marvel ingenuity is, which is what Mars Guy was doing back in April of 2021. Let's prove that a helicopter weighing just under 700 grams in the roughly 0.4G of Mars, with 1.2 meter long rotor spinning at about 2500 RPM, can indeed fly in an atmosphere with less than 1% the density of Earth's atmosphere. And no, this does not defy physics. It just seems like it does if you don't do the math. Then there's the fact that it wasn't designed to endure the brutally cold and power-depleting Martian winter. But it has. After the flight rate dropped to just 2 in 4 months, ingenuity has powered back with three flights in September. The last two in just a week. Sometime between the end of flight 32 and the start of flight 33, a piece of FOD as its known, from an unknown component of the landing system, blew in on the wind and snagged on one of the four feet of ingenuity. The FOD might have been visible with the downward-looking nav cam, but there was no reason to look after the successful landing of flight 32. So flight 33 took off unaventfully, except for the first-ever event in which a piece of spacecraft debris took off with it. It held onto the foot until ingenuity reached the flight altitude of 10 meters before transitioning to horizontal flight. That's right, when it dropped off. It's noteworthy that the rotor downwash alone wasn't enough to blow it off, and indication of the meager force needed to lift such a lightweight helicopter. This FOD has the look of torn fabric, so it's probably a piece of the parachute used during spacecraft descent back in February of 2021. And yes, this is another example of one of the remnants of Mars' exploration in its infancy, but let's put it into perspective. The missions that have landed or crashed on Mars in the past 50 years total nearly 10 kilograms of stuff. This could easily be hauled away into garbage trucks, but some of it will likely be hauled away to museums on Earth, and the rest probably will be sold to collectors. After ridding itself of the FOD, ingenuity continued on its westward flight, passing over one of the many troughs that crisscross the terrain in front of the delta. These likely are fractures in the igneous rocks laid down as lava flows or ash deposits, probably before the delta was in place. It's possible that the fractures formed as the hot igneous rocks cooled and contracted, but their large size is more consistent with fractures formed as these rocks settled over time. There's a gap in the Navcam video because not all of the images have been downlinked yet. Small crater comes into view that's visible from orbit and helps to locate the end of the flight, which covered 111 meters in 55 seconds. This flight continues to close the gap with perseverance, which in the coming months will be driving back to location to deposit a cache of sample tubes, which I'll talk about in a future episode. Hopefully we'll get to see the two explorers join up again at what's now called the Sample Depot. Maybe they can swap stories about FOD.