According to #Ingenuity's Chief Engineer Travis Brown (2h interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4XpLZqc6ao), the plan for the heli after #Flight72 was to meet #Perseverance somewhere close to Bright Angel, a future science target for the rover. The rover would take some pictures of the heli from close range to document changes on the hardware that had occurred over the course of 3 years.
Brown also mentioned that Ingenuity's budget was running dry
NASA SpaceFlight #NSF had a very interesting live interview with Travis Brown, PhD, #Ingenuity's current Chief Engineer. Travis said that in spite of an original though/assumption that Ingenuity's rotors had hit the ground during landing of #Flight72, they now tend to believe that it was rather a very hard landing that damaged the rotors, since there is no evidence anywhere on the regolith of a blade hit.
For any analysis to be more than just a hunch, it must at least state what facts, assumptions, or calculations it is based on. Alternative hypotheses, when most of the actual evidence is unknown or can take different explanations, can make use of different or overlooked facts, and can offer grounds for their falsification.
For #Ingenuity's rotors to hit (leveled) ground, the heli must have a tilt > 60° (it is 70° in the image below). If a rotor hit an inclined ground at the lower side with a, say, 20° slope, the tilt would have to be 80-90°.
It seems strange to me that there aren't any other scuffs in the regolith made by the rotors when they supposedly hit the ground.
Here is a theory:
• The blades disintegrated in mid-air.
• The scuffs we see were not made by the rotors but by the helicopter's feet; it dropped fast, bounced, and then landed at its final location.
• The disintegrated blades spread to pieces so they are not seen around the incident, except for one which flew south, almost intact.
Here is an idea about how that deep scuff under #Ingenuity's body may have happened. It doesn't appear to have been made by one of the blades hitting the ground.
Animated left front foot hitting the ground
HELI_RTE
Image captured from RMC 72.0001/1
Sol 1065, LMST: 14:02:54
More about what appears to be a delamination of the remaining upper rotor blade of #Ingenuity, seen previously in the SUPERCAM images, and now spotted in a number of HELI_NAV and HELI_RTE images.
This is an animation of cropped RTE images captured over a period of 2 hours.
HELI_RTE
Image captured from RMC 72.0001/7
Sol 1043, LMST: 07:49:07